Sam Gentile: XML and Web Services

Sam comments on the newtelligence Web Services Extensions for ASP.NET, saying "This is great news. I know of at least one company desiring .NET implementations of WS-Security". Although I was pretty excited when I first read about the toolkit because this would be the first .NET implementation of WS-Security, reading the licence took the edge off a little - even though it's TechEd 2002 demo code, it's not like most of the Microsoft samples that you can take and use in your own apps at your own risk. The source isn't yet available and the licence is for "educational and noncommercial use only" - basically it allows you to download and test the software on one machine only & lasts for 30 days from the initial download. The web site doesn't state clearly if this is going to be a product at some point in the future, hopefully it will be. In any event, we should definitely thank Clemens et al for doing the work, but this isn't yet the 100% solution for ISVs waiting on .NET WS-Security toolkits. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

Shoot. Thanks Peter for looking into that. That pretty much makes it only useful for me to learn from and not much else then. Sigh.

Make sense of WS_DISCOVERY

According to this article, "Microsoft deprecated DISCO search for ASP.NET Web services in Visual Studio .NET's Add Web Reference dialog. RC-1's "Find Web Services on the Local Machine" link is missing. DISCO isn't gone; it's hibernating. Learn how to re-enable DISCO searches with a simple change to your machine.config file. Get ready for DISCO's replacement, WS-Inspection, with C# examples that generate .wsil files."

Digging Into the Soap Headers with the .NET Framework

I'm not a SOAP guy, but this looks like an interesting article on Digging Into the SOAP Headers with the .NET Framework. Matt Powell looks at using SOAP headers in the .NET Framework, including what information should go in the header, how to read and write message headers, and how to extend the SOAP infrastructure by using SoapExtensions to handle header-block processing.

Samgentile.com is live! (but limited)

My new website samgentile.com is live (with ASP.NET)! Only first two pages so far. Let me know what you think.

Update: I have copied the rest of the pages up there. They are still html pages and need to be converted. Some of the naviagtion bars need to still be done. For those of you who read the old site, you'll see that the new .NET main page is not cluttered with Amazon books. They have been removed in favor of cleaner layout and more information. Its no longer going to be a selling site.

Good news for WS_SECURITY

Sun switches gears on security. Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign submit a security specification for Web services to an industry standards body, a move that has won the backing of an unlikely supporter: Sun. [CNET News.com]

Web Services Security - HTTP Basic Authentication without Active Directory

Greg has a nice post and sample code

Sam Ruby: Devcon East: Sessions and Speakers. When I get back home, I'll submit a title and abstract. Anybody have a suggestion on what they would like to hear me talk on?

Apache, AXIS, non-MSFT stuff that I know nothing about

SOAP 1.2 goes to Last Call [Simon Fell]

DevCon East Speakers Up

DevCon East. The initial list of speakers is up for Chris Sells' Web Services DevCon East. Lots of others have said it, but I will too: if you're interested in Web Services, go. I see that Peter Drayton, Steve Loughran, Craig Andera, Eugene Kuznetzov, Keith Ballinger, Andy Gray, and Tim Ewald are all back. I'm interested to hear what Stuart Celarier has to say as well. Lots of these talks look like reprises of what went on in Portland last March, all of them worth repeating. [Gordon Weakliem's Radio Weblog]

It was quite an experience and really the seed that got my Blog going. Every single session was worth attending. I hope to go again.

Jashua Allen Nails It On GPL and Its Prophets

Joshua Allen nails it on the contraditons of the GPL and its prophets:

One cranky coder has taken exception to this particular argument in my "No Love for GPL" post, replying, "insuring that something you give as a gift to the community remains collective property is not organized crime." Pleasantly, this statement shows an understanding of GPL that is lacking in many OSS advocates. GPL philosophy is that intellectual property should be collective property. I don't believe that collectivism is criminal, or even wrong in all cases. But I think that collectivism is best used sparingly. Collectivism (the rejection of individual property rights) is the antithesis of freedom. When RMS champions a collectivist platform and cynically says it embodies "free as in freedom", it's not exactly the end of the world. Naive, pathetically retro, and cynical are adjectives that come to mind.

But I am concerned that so many otherwise bright developers fail to see the obvious incongruencies in GPL philosophy. Computer people are smart; we are supposed to be able to figure things out. So why is it that nobody is throwing a compiler error on a guy who says (collectivism == freedom)? Not only do they fail to see the typo in that statement, they even cut-and-paste the equation into every ZDNet forum they can find. The other major bug in GPL philosophy relates to my comments about transparency. GPL advocates often assert that ((IP == secretive) && (GPL == transparent)). This equation is only true in a very narrow scope that is mostly irrelevant (source code) to most developers, and is exactly opposite in most places where it matters. This flawed equation is basically the same as saying that ((capitalism == secretive) && (collectivism == transparent)). Asserting such is like saying that down is up and up is down - capitalism has produced some secretive and shady folks, but collectivism brought us Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that GPL is "a threat to mankind". I am simply pointing out that it should be self-evident that ((capitalism == transparent) && (collectivism == secretive)). When someone suggests that collectivism (GPL) is the way to encourge more transparency, while insinuating that capitalism (IP law) encourages secrecy, my mind suffers severe cognitive dissonance. I believe that most people are pretty intelligent, and have honorable intentions. So it is really difficult for me to understand how someone could truly believe that GPL promotes transparency. Initially, I rationalized the GPL as being a typical cute prank pulled by a clever social engineer (in the spirit of Church of Subgenius). But the fact that nobody has called the bluff for so many years leads me to believe that a whole lot of people are just plain duped, and have some very fundamental defects in their understanding of democracy and freedom. I am sure that GPL is not the cause of this deficiency, but rather a symptom. Our schools don't teach civics or logic anymore. And that isn't good for democracy.

Don Box on XML and Inclusion

XML and Inclusion. "I just read your 'Object vs. XML' post on the spout and I'd be pleased if you would allow me to respond with my own personal spoutlet. Here goes:" [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Personally, I'm in the XML Schema camp. I totally see the value in having loosely formed XML documents as well, but having a schema enables much richer integration with other environments.[Drew's Blog]

New Don Box Home Page

The New Don Box Home Page. I think this one will stick for a while. : ) [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] [System.Error.Emit]

For all of us getting 404s on www.donbox.com here's why. As usual, Don brands the "team" page with his own unique humor.

Great News! GenX Open Source

Gen is the one of the best productivity tools I've used. It allows you to perform generative programming in a simple, wizard-driven environment, and integrates well with Visual C++ 6. It was the brainchild of Chris Sells, and developed by Chris and his team at DevelopMentor. It's an absolutely super product that I was thrilled to beta test (for version 1.5), and I regularly use it to lighten my C++ coding load.

Here is the e-mail message from DevelopMentor CTO Stu Holloway:

Hi faithful Gen users,

I apologize for not answering this thread sooner. As you know, Gen has been in limbo since DevelopMentor discontinued active development.

Well, limbo no more. We have decided that the best thing for our user base would be to open source Gen. Of course, open source means different things to different people, so now we are taking a pause to sort out both the open source terms and where the product will be hosted.

Expect a more detailed announcement soon.

Thanks,
Stuart Halloway
CTO, DevelopMentor
http://www.develop.com

[The .NET Guy]

WebServices DevCon East

ANN: Web Services DevCon East Call for Speakers [Chris & Tim] [Simon Fell]

Yay! A Boston one! We had a great time at the last one!

Boy, I never have been so happy to see the Windows XP desktop as this morning-). After playing games, I went and spent 4 hours playing with Linux until I let VMWare write into my disk and trash the disk. I'm finally up again.

I just discovered these: Pictures of the Web Services DevCon a whole bunch of us were at.

Apparently not free of lock-in to SPARC

Sun [via Yahoo] New Sun(TM) ONE Application Server 7 - Free of Charge, Free of Lock-In And Free of Performance Barriers [Sam Ruby]

Apparently not free of being locked into a SPARC platform (at their astronomically high prices) since they refuse to do a version for Intel.

Is DIME Ready for Prime Time?

Microsoft's newly released SOAP Toolkit 3.0 Beta 1 proposes Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) as a replacement for SOAP Messages with Attachments' MIME encoding. Download Visual Basic 6.0 and .NET versions of the DimeClient test project or try the ASP.NET Web service consumer

WebMatrix (nee Saturn) finally shipped!

WebMatrix (nee Saturn) finally shipped! Congrats to the ASP.NET team for producing a kick-ass IDE for ASP.NET - I love how it is more fully-featured than VS.NET in some regards (as in it has web service-specific wizards, an FTP browser, community integration and more).

If I could take this moment to issue a gentle nudge without seeming ungrateful, where's Cassini? And I'm still mourning the integrated command shell from Saturn, which is IMHO the feature of Emacs that I use the most, bar none, and one of the main reasons I don't use VS.NET yet as my main development environment.

[Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

Emacs???

Add security to your Web Service-based eMbedded Visual Basic applications for Pocket PC as the author walks you through some sample code.

Well, a big welcome to yet another .NET Developer, Brian Graf, who I found in my Referer logs, who was kind enough to link to a couple of my posts, and who was the first to alert me, that the famous Un-Blogger himself Chris Sells has set up an RCS feed for his un-blog at Windows Developer News!! Way Cool!

This article describes a design and implementation (C#) of the Remoting over Internet using the Web Service as a gateway into the Remoting infrastructure

Sam Ruby:: Why intertwingly? Like Jon, I consider myself an extreme anti-extremist... bundle of contradictions. There's more than one way to do it. Examples: I believe that one can like strongly typed languages like Java without hating dynamic languages like PHP. Or like SOAP without finding it necessary to dis REST.

What is a News Aggregator?. A news aggregator is a piece of software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page. [Scripting News]

Unfortunately, you just added one of the worst things about Radio's aggregator into the definition: reverse chronological order. Not only do I find myself stupidly reading from bottom to top (because I want to follow the proper chronological order!), but I also find it impossible to read my older items (beyond what's on one page) until I've read the newer ones, because all you have is "delete" capabilities, no "next/previous page" capabilities. I can't think I'm the only one frustrated by this limitation... an option is a bare minimum requirement here, IMO (but paging is probably close behind). [The .NET Guy]

I agree. I don't think that how the new items are rendered has anything to do with the definition of a news aggregator. I'm toying around with writing my own news aggregator right now, called yaNA (yet another News Aggregator), and some of the features I intend to implement are various methods of filtering (by channel name, title, description, etc.), sorting, and paging.

[Drew's Blog]

Count me in agreement as well. You are going to write it in C# right Drew? -)

DOM Level 2 for HTML has become a Candidate Recomm.... DOM Level 2 for HTML has become a Candidate Recommendation [protocol7]