Tom Richards .NET Weblog

MCSD ?

I am pretty old for this profession - I laugh (sadly) when I read about others turning 40.  I've been doing that for more years that I want to remember.

I have my DosEquis learning project to force me to learn more .NET that just the VS.NET way and this is working.

I also need to focus on things that the "young" guys aren't interested in.  My previous work has usually been hardware/embedded and embedded mixed with windows servers.

At work, I am the build master, configuration and deployment person.  I have written a lot of tools to support this.  Also I have been the general purpose solver of a lot of technical problems with our product.  Learned a lot and I don't think that there that there was a lot of interest in what I was doing as long as it works.

Anyway, I need to find more ways to stand apart from kids.  Luckily I get interested in most everything.

I have an MCSE, which was useful at a previous company, and am thinking about MCSD, whether it would be useful or not.  Wouldn't or shouldn't hurt.

UDDI and back to WebServices and WSDL

It's been interesting going.  I have been trying to understand something about UDDI, registered my own stuff and so on.  I realized very quickly (tModels) that I really don't understand WebServices very well.  I have created a bunch for my learning project DosEquis and at work.  But, I've always just used the VS.NET wizard to do the hard part.  Basically just create a bunch of methods that do what I want and go.

A while back I worked for a company where we decided to use SOAP to send messages to our server.  This was a number of years ago, we really didn't understand what where we were going except that we wanted to send a structured message using xml to our server.  Used ISAPI to extract the info from the message.

We were thinking about messages and data not methods.  I retrospect that was actually "good".  We were able to extend the messages without breaking clients or servers that didn't understand the new parts of the messages.  We even had schemas.  Even though we were just learning SOAP, XML as the "next big thing" we were "designing" our communications in a manner to the way the rest of the code was designed.

Any way, I want to get back to this way of thinking.  Yasser Shohoud's book on Web pushes using message/literal rather than RPC.  After playing with tModels, WSDL, I am starting to see clearer where I want to go with DosEquis implementation.  Since this is a data acquisition system I am also looking at SensorML, OPC and other industry standard schemas for defining data. 

It seems to be easy to get off on the wrong track (at least a different one) by just coding.  I don't do this (most of the time) in real life and I don't want to do it for DosEquis.   I am hoping that the project will be a good learning experience and "living resume" - as someone mentioned in his blog - I referenced it earlier and don't remember the link.

Learning UDDI

As part of my learning project I have been delving into UDDI. I have the skeleton for the project working and needed to "interconnect" it - or let the pieces and the client find out where things are.  Things being services.

I have a number of books with sections on UDDI.  The most useful have been:

• "Real World XML Web Services" by Yasser Shohoud.  Always my main source for webservices.
• "UDDI building registry-base web services solutions" by naresh apte and toral mehta.  Helped more in the overview of how a business would use UDDI but does contain a lot of code.

Other resources that have helped are the series of articles by Karsten Januszweski for the UDDI SDK. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnuddi/html/runtimeuddi1.asp etc.

Also a couple of blogs by Clement Vasters: http://radio.weblogs.com/0108971/2003/07/09.html#a216 as an I opener on the power of UDDI.

I am still finding it a little difficult to get my mind around business entities, services and tModels and categories and ...

I am attempting to learn this by both reading and doing.  I have "played" with http://test.uddi.microsoft.com and a number of samples.  Plus a lot of my own code attempts.  It's scary but I might be getting it - or at least getting it enough to get into trouble.  Although with a learning project I can't really get into too much trouble.  If I do, I'll start over - nothing lost but lots gained.

I see this as something I really need to know to meet some of the goals of my learning project.

My blogs seem simple compared to others.  I am trying to move up from just a C# programmer at work to something more. It doesn't help that I'm not very good at expressing myself - maybe part of the point of a blog.  Anyway ...