June 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Nothing that I can add here other than to link to the post: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/06/28/416185.aspx

There's a sample implementation of reliable messaging for the WSE 3.0 Technical Preview been made available up here http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwse/html/wseandws-rm.asp#wseandws-rm_topic5 I've yet to have a chance to play with this but it looks very cool indeed - testament to the power of the architecture of these stacks that you can plug these bits post installation

I just wanted to highlight that there are a couple of free, online books around Visual Basic 2005 for developers who are working with VB6 today; Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun/staythepath/additionalresources/upgradingvb6/ Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/whidbey/introto2005/

With WSE you can choose to apply security to your web services through either code or configuration and most people would choose configuration. You get WS-Security provided features of authenticating who a SOAP message came from, checking the integrity of the message for tampering and also protecting the privacy of the message from people who snoop on it. If you go down the configuration route then you apply it via policy . This means that you deploy a little XML file next to the service and the XML file controls what you are/aren't prepared to send and receive. For instance you can require that your service won't receive a message unless it's signed with a Kerberos token and so on. You can drop a similar policy file next to a client as well and, thereby, get a client and service to have compatible policies so that they can exchange messages. In WSE2.0 you used a configuration wizard to build the policy file specifying your requirements around authentication, integrity and privacy and it spat out a file that complied...

I’ve been playing a little bit with the Message Transmission Optimisation Mechanism (MTOM) support in WSE 3.0. From my point of view, MTOM’s about moving lumps of binary around in SOAP messages and optimizing that whilst not damaging the “XML ness” of those messages by which I mean being able to present a proper XML Infoset when someone asks for one. MTOM’s meant to be the ultimate replacement for the WS-Attachments technology in WSE2.0 and the guys out there doing SOAP with Attachments (SwA) also agree that MTOM’s the right way to go for moving binary around in SOAP. Because MTOM preserves that “XML ness” it makes it possible to combine MTOM’d messages with things like WS-Security so that you can sign and encrypt your SOAP messages even if they’ve got large lumps of binary in them whereas with WSE2.0 and WS-Attachments today you have to take a different approach for attached binary data. In understanding this stuff, the main thing to get seems to be the XML-binary Optimised Packaging (XOP) spec ( here ). XOP...

In follow-up to this post ( http://mtaulty.com/blog/archive/2005/06/12/2765.aspx ) I had a bit of a play with the AJAX.NET wrapper and found it to be pretty good fun. I just wrote a simple ASPX page which displays data out of the Northwind database. In the Page_Load for the page I wrote a little bit of code to register the page for using AJAX and to download some script to the browser. In particular, the script has a function called ClientGetTable which takes a table name and performs the AJAX functionality to go and get that table from the server which returns back a DataSet. There's also a Callback function which is called when the AJAX work is done. This takes the "browser-side" representation of the DataSet and turns it into an HTML table. Finally, there's a bit of script registered for the onload event so that we initially call GetClientTable('shippers') so that there's some data on the screen when the page first loads. The whole page_load function looks like this; private void Page_Load(object sender, System...

I've been thinking about something very simple. Say I want to write a web service with an operation called something like LookupAddress which takes as part of its data a postcode (or zipcode ). The thing I'm struggling with is that if I want to build that new postcode data type as some kind of restricted string then the only "language" I'm aware of for modelling it is XSD. If I start with anything other than XSD (e.g. a .NET type in ASMX, WSE or Indigo) then I can't model a string that has a specific length and matches a particular regular expression. There's no way of emitting that WSDL (AFAIK) from any of those frameworks. So, I'd have to start with XSD. No? Further, if I do take that XSD and bring it into the environment of my toolkit then I'm a bit stuck because the toolkit can't represent the restriction I've built so it'll get lost at that point.

Just a quick note. In case you're wondering, my WSE tracing tool does not work with the WSE3.0 CTP that's available right now. There's a bunch of work I'd need to do in order to move to Framework 2.0 for the tool (pretty easy work as it happens - pretty much done this). There's a little bit more work around understanding WSE 3.0 and how it's different with respect to filters and policy assertions - the model seems to have changed and it sounds like I'd need to write a custom policy assertion rather than just a filter or two for WSE3.0. No doubt, it's achievable. I'll try and get a version that works "real soon now", just as soon as I get some time to play with WSE 3.0 properly.