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Contents tagged with Web Services

  • The Future of Microsoft SOA Client Architecture, my take

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    So to answer the headline in Scott's post, yes I do believe IBF is a herald of the service clients to come. An autonomous client that plugs into another applications and communicates with it's host via XML messages. That's what we saw in the Don-and-Chris Show during the PDC 2003 keynote on Indigo. Even this implementation is almost completely decoupled from Office. It runs autonomous during debugging already, but still requires a COM interface (via. NET interop) as the backchannel to the host app. In the future hopefully more and more apps will be able to share their current context, serialized to XML messages, with frameworks like IBF. I have two SO projects going on right now that that would tremendously benefit from such capabilities.

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  • What do IBF 1.5 and BizTalk have in common?

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    Version 1.5 of the Information Bridge Framework (IBF) was released last weekend and is available for download from MSDN.
     
    I gave it a whirl to get ready for my seminar in Austin on Wednesday and found that the description of one of the new features is a slight understatement. On the download page it says:
    A few of the improvements you can look forward to in this release are an integrated debugger, integrated XSL transformation capability
     
    Well, upon further examination, it turns out that the XSL transform capability is in fact the BizTalk 2004 Mapper. It's installed when you install the new Metadata designer -- free …
     
    Anyway … IBF 1.5 is a huge, huge improvement over 1.0. Big kudos to the IBF team.
     
    If you happen to be in Austin on 3/2 and you're curious about IBF 1.5, you can attend the seminar -- also free. To register, please go to the Microsoft Training Web Site (http://www.microsofttraining.com/content/invitationcode.asp) and enter Course Code Number 303157.

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  • C++ support in WSE 2.0 SP2

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    WSE 2.0 SP2 adds some support for adding WSE to C++ projects, which had been missing since the initial release last May.
     
    At last, the WSE Configuration Editor, the one that comes up when you right-click in the Solution Explorer and then select WSE 2.0 Settings allows you to enable and disable WSE for C++ project and lets you create policies.
     
     
    Before SP2, nothing would happen when you clicked on the item in the context menu. Unfortunately, other IDE integration, such as automatic generation of WSE proxies in a WSE enabled project is still not happening and probably will never happen in WSE 2 because wsewsdl2.exe does not support generation of C++ code. If you take a look with Reflector, you'll find that for some reason, the tool does not emit the proxy code via CodeDOM, hence it would be really difficult for the WSE team to generate C++ proxy classes.
     
    A general shortcoming of the IDE integration of the configuration tool, that's not specific the C++ projects are the relative references generated for the policy files. When you enable policy for a C++ an application project (not a web service), the tool will add
     
    <policy>
    <cache name="../policyCache.config" />
    </policy>
     
     
    to the application's configuration file. Unfortunately, the relative reference would only valid during development -- if C++ projects behaved like C# projects in the first place. When you deploy the application you most likely will not have the policyCache.config file one directory higher than the application and its config file. To complicate matters a little further, C++ application projects behave differentely than C# of VB.NET projects in Visual Studio. C++ projects don't even copy the app.config file to the output directory. The best solution is to delete the relative path information from the path to the policyCache.config file.
     
    <policy>
    <cache name="policyCache.config" />
    </policy>
     
    and then add a post build event to rename app.config and copy it, together with the policyCache file to the output directory:
     
    copy $(ProjectDir)app.config $(OutDir)\$(TargetFileName).config /Y
    copy "$(ProjectDir)policyCache.config" $(OutDir)\ /Y
     
     
    Changing the path and letting the post build event do the work for you also helps when you build an installer. Simply mark the policyCache.config file as "Content", add "Content File" to the installer project and you're ready to go.
     
    Finally, when you build and ASP.NET Web service in C++ you have to make sure that the policyCache.config file is deployed to the web server.
     

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  • ANN: Talking in Austin on 12/13

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    I am giving a presentation on Secure Web Services and Secure Office Productivity Solutions based on IBF at ADNUG's December meeting on 12/13. 5:30pm at the Microsoft Technology Center:
     
    About the presentation:
    Web services are making their ways into the enterprise. Yet, Web service technology is continuing its evolution into a mature, full-fledged platform for feature-rich and secure enterprise applications.
     
    This talk presents two second-generation development frameworks: Web services enhancements (WSE) and the Integration Bridge Framework (IBF). WSE adds a number of improvements over the Web services support built into the .NET Framework namely:
    ·  Support for the WS-Security family of specifications
    ·  light-weight Web services without requiring the IIS web serve
    ·  Improved support for message-oriented message exchange patterns
    ·  A declarative, policy driven programming model based on WS-Policy
     
    IBF is an application framework to enhance productivity of information workers by integrating Web services directly into Microsoft Office 2003 documents, such as Word documents or emails displayed in Outlook. Bringing data from other applications directly into office documents eliminates the need of switching between different applications offers and thus streamlines business processes.
     
    Together the two frameworks deliver a secure platform for effective and secure productivity solutions. The talk examines the need for security in a Web services environment and introduces the capabilities of WSE and IBF 
     
    For more details on ADNUG and our monthly meeting schedule please visit http://www.adnug.org.
     
    Hope to see you there.

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