Mike Taulty's Blog
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July 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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Mike Taulty's Blog

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  • Web Developer Event Follow Up: Music Service ASMX V2.0 and WSE 3.0 Demo

    We did an event a couple of days ago which linked together a few different UI topics, namely; ASP.NET Web Forms V2.0 Windows Forms V2.0 and Smart Client "Avalon" Introduction (it was still called "Avalon" when we did the session, now it's called "Windows Presentation Foundation"). and we also dropped in a session about communication between applications based around ASMX Web Services V2.0 and the features in the WSE 3.0 Technical Preview. For the web services session I built up a simple demo application to show various features of ASMX 2.0 (particularly around custom serialization, generic type support, basic profile compliance and the new interface based development model). Aaron documents all these really well :-) For WSE 3.0 we showed how we can host ASMX web services over the TCP transport, we also showed how we can use MTOM for binary and we showed the new simplified security policy and (in particular) I used the username over X509 security settings to control access to perform...
  • ASP.NET 2.0 Migration Centre on MSDN

    There's a new MSDN centre gone up around migrating to ASP.NET 2.0. The link's here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/migration/upgrade/default.aspx The first document ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/migration/upgrade/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/upgradingaspnet.asp ) looks like a good place to start, it runs through the upgrade wizard and the functionality in there and "common issues" that you might see.
  • Windows Vista and WinFX Beta 1 Available

    Blimey. An interesting day! We did a Microsoft event down in Reading today where we spent some time talking about user interface technologies (Web Forms 2.0, Windows Forms 2.0) and introduced "Avalon" with some demos that seemed to go down fairly well :-) I get home to discover that the Windows Vista beta is live on MSDN for people to download - you can go here to grab it http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getthebeta/default.aspx and you can now also download WinFX Beta 1. It looks like "Avalon" and "Indigo" have formal names; "Avalon" - "Windows Presentation Foundation" "Indigo" - "Windows Communication Foundation" I've got some installing to do! Time for a complete re-installation of my laptop I think :-)
  • WSE 3.0: Tracing tool updated

    Once again, I've updated my tracing tool for the WSE 3.0 Preview. The bits are at http://mtaulty.com/downloads/Wse3Trace.zip It's a change for the installation program - from what I can see the previous version I had published didn't put things in the GAC the way it was meant to so, hopefully, I've rectified that.
  • Deploying Avalon Express (XAPP) Applications with the WinFX CTP B1 RC

    I'm sure this is a FAQ but I didn't find it. If you want to deploy Avalon Express applications from your IIS server then you need to register a bunch of MIME types. There's a script in the WinFX B1 RC documentation that you can run to get this done. A very similar script can be found online here ( http://winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wcp_conceptual/winfx/appcore/overviews/BuildDeploy_IIS_MIME_Types.asp ) and Tim recently pointed to it from his blog here ( http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2005/07/01/434771.aspx ). I spent ages today because the script in the SDK docs is different from the one that's online and (as far as I can see) the one in the SDK docs has a bug in it. My recommendation - use the online script. Ignore the one in the SDK. I found it quite difficult to debug this thing so I thought I'd mention how I finally worked it out. I was in a weird situation where I could run .XAPP files from the public internet but not from my local server. I downloaded the HTTP Filtering...
  • Microsoft UK SmartClient Competition

    The winners of the Microsoft UK SmartClient competition have been announced. I played a minor part in setting this up and working out how the questions should work and so on so I'm glad to see that it's been successful and that we gave some things away! :-) You can see the winners over here; https://s.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/connection/smartclient/default.mspx Congratulations to David Ing who gets to drive away in a brand new Smart Car Roadster. If you took part in this competition and have ideas about what was good/bad/ugly about it then I'd be more than happy to hear them (in the absence of comments use the Contact button on the left).
  • VS 2005, Indigo and "Add Web Reference"

    This is more than likely a FAQ but I found it helpful yesterday and so I post it here. If you (like me) have installed Visual Studio 2005 onto your machine alongside the WinFX Beta 1 Release Candidate then you'll probably find that when you go to do an "Add Web Reference" in Visual Studio 2005 you're getting an Indigo proxy built for your web service client rather than an "ASP.NET proxy". Sometimes you might not want an Indigo proxy. If you don't want it then you need to go visit your devenv.exe.config for Visual Studio and comment out the bit that brings in the Indigo importer; <system.web> <webServices> <soapExtensionImporterTypes> <add type="Microsoft.Tools.Indigo.SoapImporter.IndigoSoapImporter,TemplateInstaller, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8a6b4c2a8d4d0b53" /> </soapExtensionImporterTypes> </webServices> </system.web> and you'll be back to "normal" :-)
  • Avalon: Exporting XAML from Adobe Illustrator

    There's a blog post over here ( http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2005/07/12/438178.aspx ) from Mike Swanson about a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator that allows you to export XAML - it's a freebie unsupported download but it looks pretty cool. Also liked his "eye candy" page: http://www.mikeswanson.com/XAMLExport/Eye%20Candy.htm
  • WSE 3.0 Tracing Tool: Updated

    I updated my tracing tool for WSE3.0 ( http://mtaulty.com/blog/archive/2005/06/27/2849.aspx ). I noticed that the installer treated it as a later version of the 2.0 tool rather than a different tool and so wouldn't side-by-side install them. That's been rectified. Notice that the font increase/decrease buttons still don't work. The download's in the same place as before.
  • Avalon: Playing around with animations and rectangles to make MCE buttons

    I've been having a brief play with Avalon and XAML and the first thing I really tried to make (once I got past "hello world") was a button that looked like those ones on the Media Center 2005 screen - the green "glowing" buttons which I really like. Here's my first attempt (minus animations of course - not sure if you can produce an animated gif from a XAML file?); The background colour's very clearly wrong (that MCE background is complex when you really stare at it) and, at the moment, this isn't actually a button (nor a highlight for a list box item) but it's just a few rectangles overlayed on top of each other so I'm sure it can be improved a lot but I was pleased with it as a first attempt (especially when I realised, right or not, how I could get multiple animations in the same screen space by overlaying things). Here's the XAML file: http://mtaulty.com/downloads/mcbutton.xaml
  • Disabling Comments

    Sorry but I've disabled comments on this site from this morning. If you want to comment then just put it on your own site and link back to me. If you want to contact me then just mail me using the form here. Getting rid of the blog spam (even with a filter) is getting too laborious to keep doing it. I flipped some bits on the .Text config to make it disable comments and it seems to have stopped allowing reading of previous comments - I'll see if I can get that back.
  • WSE 2.0: Intermediaries with SoapSender/SoapReceiver

    I updated my little WSE "routing" (I use quotes because it doesn't really work properly) experiment in order to be based on SoapSender and SoapReceiver rather than being based on SoapClient and SoapService with an explicit message exchange between the two. This does seem to make it easier in the sense that it's a lot more obvious as to what's going on and where messages are coming from and going back to. I've dropped the sample files up here: http://mtaulty.com/downloads/wseroutingexplicit.zip . As usual, apply a large pinch of salt :-) There are 3 applications in there. Firstly, there's the "service" which just adds two numbers together. It has a UI that looks like; this allows you to pick an endpoint on which to have it listen (I'd leave it) and then start it listening. Then there's the "routing intermediary". This has a UI; it uses the first 3 textboxes to build up a "starting" URI to listen on. It then creates N intermediaries. If the start URI is soap.tcp://localhost:9000/routerService then we end up with...
  • WSE 2.0: Giving up on playing around with intermediaries

    I've been bogged down in WSE and SOAP messaging. It came about as part of playing with the WSE-RM sample ( WSE 3.0 Preview- More playing with intermediaries ) and I'm afraid it comes down to a lack of understanding on my part. I've been trying to fathom the simplest case. Let's say we've got a WSE 2.0 service; public class AddArgs { public AddArgs() { } public int X; public int Y; } [SoapService("urn:calculator-com")] class Calculator : SoapService { [STAThread] static void Main(string[] args) { Uri u = new Uri("soap.tcp://localhost:9002/C"); EndpointReference r = new EndpointReference(u); SoapReceivers.Add(r, typeof(Calculator)); Console.WriteLine("C is listening..."); Console.ReadLine(); } [SoapMethod("urn:calculator-add-com")] public int Add(AddArgs args) { Console.WriteLine("C is adding..."); return(args.X + args.Y); } } I can go and built a client for this using wsewsdl2.exe by pointing at a running instance of the service and I end up with a proxy which is...
  • WSE 3.0 Preview: More playing with intermediaries

    Following up on this post WSE 3.0 Preview- Playing with intermediaries I took this a little bit further. In my previous post I'd done something to try and route SOAP messages from a photo sender to a photo receiver through as many intermediaries as I wanted to create, so we have; Sender --> Intermediary1 --> Intermediary2 --> Intermediary3 --> Intermediary(N) --> Receiver and I'd hardcoded to some extent the route that that messages take and I'd done nothing about getting messages back to Sender from Receiver . I've changed this a little bit (in anticipation of finally trying to plug in the reliable messaging sample) because I figured that, even though my service invocations are one-way here the RM stuff will want to get an ACK message back from Receiver to Sender . So, I've uploaded a 2nd version of that sample which is here: http://mtaulty.com/downloads/wsephotos2.zip The difference is in the intermediary. The intermediary now has a UI that looks like; so, as before, it still creates N intermediaries...
  • Woops

    I go and download the WS-ReliableMessaging sample for WSE 3.0 and find it has almost exactly the same "break up the photograph" sample as I just spent time creating :-) There's slight differences but the functionality looks to be the same - that'll teach me! Having said that, I learnt quite a bit making my sample so it wasn't time wasted.
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