All posts by : Scott on Writing

1 of 47 | Creating and Consuming Syndication Feeds in ASP.NET 3.5 - Do you run a website that routinely publishes new content? If so, does your site offer a syndication feed? A syndication feed is an XML file that summarizes the most recently published content and is commonly used in blogs, news sites, sports sites, social networking sites, and other content producing websites to provide a machine-readable format of the latest content. For the longest time the .NET Framework did not include built-in support for syndication feeds, meaning that if you needed to generate a syndication feed or parse the syndication feed from another site you either needed to: Write the code yourself, as demonstrated in this article of mine from March 2003: Syndicate Your Web......

2 of 47 | Accessing the DropDownList Control's SelectedIndex or SelectedValue Properties Selects the First ListItem - I was recently helping a colleague squash a bug that had popped up on a page that involved a DropDownList. Specifically, an HttpException was being thrown with the error message Cannot have multiple items selected in a DropDownList. This exception is raised, as the message notes, if a DropDownList contains multiple ListItems whose Selected properties are set to true. The page in question had a DropDownList whose values were populated from a web service on the first page load. Shortly after this population code was a foreach loop that looped through the items in the DropDownList looking for a ListItem whose value matched a user-specific setting. The first such ListItem found had its Selecte......

3 of 47 | Accessing the DropDownList Control's SelectedIndex or SelectedValue Properties Selects the First ListItem - I was recently helping a colleague squash a bug that had popped up on a page that involved a DropDownList. Specifically, an HttpException was being thrown with the error message Cannot have multiple items selected in a DropDownList. This exception is raised, as the message notes, if a DropDownList contains multiple ListItems whose Selected properties are set to true. The page in question had a DropDownList whose values were populated from a web service on the first page load. Shortly after this population code was a foreach loop that looped through the items in the DropDownList looking for a ListItem whose value matched a user-specific setting. The first such ListItem found had its Selecte......

4 of 47 | January's Toolbox Column Now Online - My Toolbox column in the January 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine is available online. The January issue examines: Script# - Script# is a utility created by Nikhil Kothari that translates C# code into JavaScript code, allowing you to create ASP.NET AJAX components and behaviors and Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets writing using a strongly-typed language (C#) with compile-time error checking, familiar OOP syntax and semantics, and better design-time tool support. Blogs of Note - Eric Lippert. Eric is a Senior Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. His blog offers some of the best in-depth looks at features in C#. He's also a very witty and talented writer, and has a knack for describing and illu......

5 of 47 | New Version of Error Logging Modules and Handlers (ELMAH) Available - ELMAH is a free, open-source library created by Atif Aziz for logging errors that occur in an ASP.NET application. I've written about ELMAH many times before; its one of the first things I setup when creating a new ASP.NET application. A new version - ELMAH 1.0 BETA 3 - was recently released. With just a few minutes of setup and configuration you can have ELMAH automatically log unhandled exceptions to a number of different data stores - SQL Server, Oracle, a Microsoft Access database, an XML file, to an e-mail address, and so on. You can also write code to proactively record an error via the ELMAH library. Granted, ASP.NET provides some built-in support for logging errors via its health m......

6 of 47 | Transferring Large Files - Every couple of weeks or so I seem to have a need to transfer (or receive) a relatively large file to another colleague or client. It might be a database zipped up into a 50 MB file, artwork totalling hundreds of megabytes, or various DLLs and source code. Over the course of my career I have used the following techniques for transferring data: E-mail - the most straightforward technique for sharing data. The major con is that many email providers reject attachments over a certain threshold, usually in the 2-10 MB range. Also, e-mail is inherently insecure, making it a non-ideal medium for transferring sensitive data like passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and so on.......

7 of 47 | Search Your Site Using Google's Custom Search Engine - Remember when people used to debate what search engine was the best among the bunnch? Do you remember back in the day when Yahoo! differentiated itself from other search engines by having actual human beings catalog, summarize, and rate large swaths of the World Wide Web? Today, search is a commodity. It's ubiquitous. Web surfers expect there to be a search box and expect accurate results returned in the blink of an eye. Because of these expectations, it's now more important than ever that your website offers search. I don't care if the site has only five static web pages that only get updated once in a blue moon, you still need search. The good news is that Google offers free tools for q......

8 of 47 | September's Toolbox Column Online - My Toolbox column in the September 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. The September issue examines: LINQPad - A free stand-alone LINQ editor/tester created by Joseph Albahari, author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell. LINQPad is like SQL Query Analyzer, but for LINQ. Blogs of Note - Rob Waling - Rob is an ASP.NET developer, independent contractor, and micro-ISV. Many blogs examine the latest coding tips and tricks, but Rob's blog is unique in that it focuses more on the business and interpersonal aspects of being a successful developer. Logging Libraries - There are a number of logging libraries available for .NET. This issue of Toolbox looks at two popular libraries: the Enterprise......

9 of 47 | August's Toolbox Column Online - My Toolbox column in the August 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. The July issue examines: FileHelpers - .NET includes XML serialization capabilities, which makes it easy to load an XML file into a collection of objects and to save object state back out to an XML file. If you need similar functionality for delimited or fixed-length text files (like CSV files), check out FileHelpers, an open-source .NET library created by Marcos Meli that provides such serialization capabilities. Blogs of Note - K. Scott Allen - a great blogger with in-depth and timely posts on ASP.NET, LINQ, ASP.NET MVC, and project management. YSlow for Firebug - Firebug is a free Firefox extension that ......

10 of 47 | Email Verification for New Accounts via ASP.NET's Membership Framework - In my last blog entry, The CreateUserWizard and Validation ErrorMessages, reader Andrei Rinea commented: I wish the whole Membership set of controls would be replaced with better ones. Very often I need to have an authentication/authorization mechanism that doesn't need a username but an e-mail. I need email verification and in case the user loses the password he/she should be able to recover it without knowing (a) username. This scenario is possible, but requires some customizations of the Membership controls. For instance, you can configure Membership so that an Email is not required, and then customize the CreateUserWizard control so that it uses the text “E-mail:” in place of “Usern......

11 of 47 | My First Three Website Security Tutorials Now Live - Over the past few months I've been writing a series of ASP.NET security tutorials for the www.asp.net site, much like my Working with Data tutorial series. This tutorial series focuses specifically on forms authentication, authorization, Membership, and Roles (using the SQL Server providers). Today, the first three tutorials have been published: Security Basics and ASP.NET Support [VB | C#] - discusses important security concepts and what facilities are available in ASP.NET to assist in implementing forms authentication, authorization, user accounts, and roles. An Overview of Forms Authentication [VB | C#] - provides an in-depth look at the forms authentication workflow. Forms Authe......

12 of 47 | Five New "Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0" Tutorials Available - SiteMaps and Batched Data - My Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 tutorial series has been updated with five new tutorials: one on building database-driven site maps and four on working with batched data. The site map feature introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 allows developers to logically arrange a web application's pages into a hierarchy. This hierarchy can then be accessed programmatically through the SiteMap class in the .NET Framework or rendered visually through the Menu, TreeView, and SiteMapPath controls. .NET ships with a site map implementation that serializes the site map to an XML file. Since the site map framework was designed using the provider model, developers can easily plug in their own serialization implemen......

13 of 47 | June's Toolbox Column Now Online - My Toolbox column in the June 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine is now avaiable online. The June issue examines three products: GhostDoc - a free Visual Studio Add-On that helps automate the repetitive task of adding XML comments. Authorize.NET - one of many payment gateways that you can use to start accepting online payments. ReSharper - enhance your Visual Studio develop-time experience with this productivity tool, which offers extended refactoring support, customizable code formatting, built-in unit testing, tools for quickly exploring the types, classes, and files in a project, and so forth.  This month's issue reviewed Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (Seventh Editi......

14 of 47 | JavaScript Includes - Be Careful With Your Syntax!! - When adding client-side script to a web page, the JavaScript can be embedded directly within the page's HTML or provided via an external reference similar to include files in programming languages. When using JavaScript include files, the browser will cache the file so that it doesn't need to be downloaded on subsequent postbacks and page visits. By embedding the script directly wthin the page's markup, the script must be downloaded on each page visit (with the rest of the markup), which is wasteful if the script content is static. Therefore, JavaScript include files lessen the amount of data the client must download, improving the end user's experience. So JavaScript includes are a Good Th......

15 of 47 | GotDotNet? Not Anymore, You Don't - Microsoft's web property GotDotNet will be completely shut down and phased out of existence by June 19, 2007. From the GotDotNet homepage: Microsoft will be phasing out the GotDotNet site by July 2007.    Microsoft will phase out all GotDotNet functionality by July 2007. We will phase out features according to the schedule below. During the phase-out we will ensure that requests for features or pages that are no longer available will render enough information for you to understand what has changed. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact the GotDotNet Support team.We are phasing out GotDotNet for the following reasons: Microsoft wants to eliminate redundant......

16 of 47 | An Introduction to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) - JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is simple, lightweight data-exchange format that is used by most AJAX implementations (although it can be used by other applications and domain spaces). It is used to serialize data structures into a text format that is especially easy to parse and evaluate directly from JavaScript code. Back in 2006, Atif Aziz approached me and asked if I'd like to coauthor an introductory article on JSON. The net result is the latest article on MSDN online, An Introduction to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in JavaScript and .NET. The article focuses on JSON - its purpose, the standard, a comparison of XML and JavaScript, and so forth. The .NET examples use Atif's open......

17 of 47 | Top Ten ASP.NET Tips and Traps - Presented this Saturday at the SoCal .NET Technical Summit - This Saturday - September 23rd - I'll be presenting my talk, Top 10 ASP.NET Tips and Traps, at the SoCal .NET Technical Summit in Irvine, California. It's not too late to sign up! For $99 you get a full day of sessions from a variety of top-notch speakers (including Rocky Lhotka, Scott Stanfield, Bill Vaughn, Chris Rolon, and others), organized into four tracks: Web/Atlas, Data, Architecture and Enterprise Practices, and Vista/WPF/WCF/WWF. Earlier I listed the tips and traps I was planning on presenting, and asked for any feedback. I ended up settling on the following list (in the following order), organizing the tips/traps into four categories: Caching TIP: Use SQL Cache Dependencie......

18 of 47 | October's Toolbox Column in MSDN Magazine - My tenth Toolbox column in the October 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now avaiable online. The October issue examines two products: PreEmtive Solutions Dotfuscator (version 3.0) - obfuscate your .NET assemblies to protect your company's intellectual property. Obfuscation (IMO) is a must if you develop a product that is shipped to customers. NHibernate - quickly persist and retrieve information from a database using NHibernate to automate the process of building the necessary code and query capabilities. NHibernate is a free, open-source framework tool for quickly building a data access layer between your business objects and data store. This month's issue reviewed Eric Brown's book SQL......

19 of 47 | Displaying Formatted Source Code in a Web Page - In my last blog entry you may have noticed that my code snippet looks rather spiffy. Here, let me show off just how spiffy my source code formatting is!     1 private ProductsTableAdapter _productsAdapter = null;     2 protected ProductsTableAdapter Adapter     3 {     4     get {     5         if (_productsAdapter == null)     6             _productsAdapter = new ProductsTableAdapter();     7      8         return _productsAdapter;     9     }    10 }    11     12 [System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodAttribute(System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodType.Select, true)]    13 public Northwind.ProductsDataTable GetProducts()    14 {    15     return Adapter.GetProducts(); ......

20 of 47 | Supporting HTTP Authentication and Forms Authentication in a Single ASP.NET Web Site - Authenticating users visiting an Internet-based website is usually accomplished in one of two ways: Using Forms authentication - here a user is prompted for their credentials through a standard web page form Using HTTP authentication - RFC 2617 defines two standard HTTP protocol-level authentication schemes - Basic authentication and Digest authentication. When a browser interfaces with a site using this form of authentication, it displays that familiar modal dialog box prompting you for your credentials (see this image). Many websites use Forms authentication, as it provides more control over the user experience and many platforms (such as ASP.NET) include tools for adding Forms authe......

21 of 47 | Supporting HTTP Authentication and Forms Authentication in a Single ASP.NET Web Site - Authenticating users visiting an Internet-based website is usually accomplished in one of two ways: Using Forms authentication - here a user is prompted for their credentials through a standard web page form Using HTTP authentication - RFC 2617 defines two standard HTTP protocol-level authentication schemes - Basic authentication and Digest authentication. When a browser interfaces with a site using this form of authentication, it displays that familiar modal dialog box prompting you for your credentials (see this image). Many websites use Forms authentication, as it provides more control over the user experience and many platforms (such as ASP.NET) include tools for adding Forms authe......

22 of 47 | What's with the MSDN2 Page Sizes? - Is it just me, or are the online web pages at MSDN2 extremely “bulky?” I really like the MSDN2 design, from the friendly URLs to the slicker tree view, but garsh darnit if it isn't slower than molasses. There's typically a several-second pause from clicking on a link in a help doc or from the tree view, and having the page loaded, and my little network traffic monitor in the Google Desktop Sidebar shows network traffic peaking at 160 KB/s for several seconds. I decided to break out Fiddler to see just what the heck was slowing everything down. I picked an arbitrary MSDN2 page - BoundField Class - and here are the results: 35 Files were downloaded from Microsoft's site during the request,......

23 of 47 | April's Toolbox Column in MSDN - My fourth Toolbox column in the April 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. The April issue examines three products: IEWatch, an IE plug-in for dissecting HTTP traffic and diving into the markup sent to the browser SQL Examiner, a tool for comparing and synchronizing the schemas of different databases, and VBDocman .NET, an XML comments tool for VB.NET; also includes a nifty XML comment WYSIWYG tool for creating XML comments in both VS.NET and VS2005. Also reviewed is APress's SQL Server 2005 T-SQL Recipes. From the article: Most developers rely on IntelliSense and statement completion to relieve the burden of memorizing the vast array of classes, methods, properties......

24 of 47 | Review: Programming Visual Basic 2005 - In general, there are two kinds of computer trade books: those that focus on a very specific topic, such as building custom WinForm controls; and those that cover a more general topic, such as learning C#, or mastering ASP.NET. Those more general books tend to be quite lengthy, understandably, as they must cover a wide swath of material. Programming Visual Basic 2005 (O'Reilly Publishing, $39.95, 548 pages), by Jesse Liberty, is an exception to this rule. Programming Visual Basic 2005 tackles Windows and Web application development, as well as introducing new Visual Basic 2005 features, in a relatively scant 548 pages. The book's low page count is due in large part to the author's insist......

25 of 47 | March's Toolbox Column in MSDN - My third Toolbox column in the March 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. The March issue of Toolbox examines the following two products: Visual Build Pro by Kinook Software. aspNetEmail, by Advanced Intellect LLC I also review two books: Programming .NET Components 2nd Edition (O'Reilly), and Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005 (Apress). For those famliar with (the now defunct) Pro X series by Wrox, you're likely aware that the one thing all of those books had in common was their weight. They were all 1,000+ page titles authored by a committee. Pro ASP.NET 2.0 has the familiar weight and page count (topping out at more than 1,200 pages), but to its credit this book does a good ......

26 of 47 | SoCal CodeCamp THIS WEEKEND - If you're in Southern California this weekend, why not drop by the free, two-day SoCal CodeCamp conference? It's hosted in Fullerton, CA with sessions on both Saturday the 21st and Sunday the 22nd. A complete schedule is available here. As I blogged about before, I'll be giving two talks on Sunday the 22nd: Syndicating and Consuming RSS - RSS is an increasingly popular XML-based syndication format used by websites to keep interested visitors abreast with the site's latest news and information. News sites like CNN, MSNBC, and Yahoo! News provide their latest headlines through RSS; virtually every blog offers an RSS feed. In this talk we'll look at RSS's structure and see how to both synd......

27 of 47 | Debugging Visualizers in Visual Studio 2005 - One of the cool new features of Visual Studio 2005 is the Debugger Visualizer, which provides an alertnate way to view an object in the VS 2005 debugger. What's especially cool about these little gems is that not only does Visual Studio ship with a number of buit-in visualizers for viewing long strings, XML, HTML, images, and so on, but also provides a mechanism for developers to be able to create their own visualizers and plug them into Visual Studio. (See Creating a Debugger Visualizer Using Visual Studio for more information.) Yesterday, Scott Guthrie posted a blog entry about free debugger visualizers released by various folks in the community, such as an XML visualizer, and a regular ......

28 of 47 | SoCal Code Camp - A FREE Two-Day Conference! - Live in Southern California Interested in attending a free two-day conference with talks from dozens of great presenters If so, check out the SoCal CodeCamp, which runs from Saturday, January 21st through Sunday, January 22nd 2006 at Cal State Fullerton (location/lodging information). While the sessions appear to be a bit heavy on the .NET side, there are talks on non-.NET topics, such as Python, J2EE, EJB, and Ruby. Furthermore, there are a slew ofconcepttalks, which focus on a software design methodology (agile development, test driven development, etc.), or an overall technology paradigm (an overview of Web Services, for example)without delving into a specific technology. Of course there......

29 of 47 | Google Base - Search Crap Easier! - The `blogosphere` is abuzz with Google`s latest pre-pre-Alpha release, Google Base(the first pre- is in there because the product isn`t even released yet, save for http://base.google.com, which is up sometimes, down othertimes, and doesn`t really do anything other than generate a fevered pitch among bloggers). Google Base. From a good ArsTechnica articleon this pre-pre-Alpha service, Google Base is Google`s database into which you can add all types of content. We`ll host your content and make it searchable online for free. In a nutshell, purportedly this service will allow Sally Housecoat and Joe Meatball to upload and add their own content to Google Base, which is sort of going to be this......

30 of 47 | Another Great Use for GMail - I`ve blogged about potential uses for GMail before - Using Email as a Knowledge Base, How to Manage ListServs Using GMail, Keeping Track of TODO Items, and so on - and I offer yet another one.This idea came by way of Boing Boing: Archiving Email on GMail. The jist of the idea is to use GMail`s abundant disk quota and Internet access as a means to backup email. I`ve just implemented a couple Rules on Outlook to auto-forward all incoming emails to a separate GMail account setup exclusively to serve as a backup of my email accounts. Since I leave my home computer running 24x7, Outlook continuously downloads email from my various POP3 accounts and, now, will be continuously forwarding those ema......

31 of 47 | Fixing "The Following Add-Ins Failed to Load" Error in Visual Studio .NET - I am giving a talk on Web Services this week and one technology I discuss in virtually every Web Services talk is the Web Services Enhancement (WSE)Toolkit. One of the nice things about the WSE Toolkit is that it integrates with Visual Studio .NET - right-click on the Web Service or client project and there`s a WSE 2.0 Settings option in the context menu that brings up a GUI to edit the WSE-related settings. However, in running through the talk/demo code today, I noticed that my copy of VS.NET on my laptop wasn`t displaying the option in the GUI. My first attempt at fixing this was to simply uninstall and reinstall the WSE Toolkit. Upon restarting VS.NET after this process,I got a dialog bo......

32 of 47 | DVXP`s TEdit.NET Control - My last blog entry provided a list of commercial, third-party ASP.NET server controls I have used in past projects, along with a mini-review of each. Today I added another notch to the proverbial commercial ASP.NET server control headboard: DVXP`s TEdit.NET. TEdit, which stands for Table Edit, is a Web control designed to make viewing/editing/inserting/deleting data from a database table as easy as point-and-click. And it does a pretty good job at that. In past projects I`ve always extended the DataGridin some manner to show, edit, delete, etc. data from a database table. TEdit.NET makes this job much easier, but does introduce a bit of a learning curve for those who have always used the Da......

33 of 47 | TONIGHT: What Are .NET Web Services Talk - Tonight I will be presenting a talk titled What are Web Servicesfor the San Diego .NET User Group Beginner`s SIG(a synopsis of the talk is given at the end of this post). The talk starts at 6:30 and is held in an office in Del Mar, just north of the 56 and just east of the 5. In addition to hearing me babble on about Web Services for an hour and change, there will be free pizza!!! Hope to see you there! This talk will examine the fundamentals of Web services from a beginner`s perspective, focusing on the goals of Web services and common uses of Web services in industry today. It Includes a high-level look at the core Web service standards, along with live demos illustrating how to create a......

34 of 47 | TONIGHT: What Are .NET Web Services Talk - Tonight I will be presenting a talk titled What are Web Servicesfor the San Diego .NET User Group Beginner`s SIG(a synopsis of the talk is given at the end of this post). The talk starts at 6:30 and is held in an office in Del Mar, just north of the 56 and just east of the 5. In addition to hearing me babble on about Web Services for an hour and change, there will be free pizza!!! Hope to see you there! This talk will examine the fundamentals of Web services from a beginner`s perspective, focusing on the goals of Web services and common uses of Web services in industry today. It Includes a high-level look at the core Web service standards, along with live demos illustrating how to create a......

35 of 47 | TONIGHT: What Are .NET Web Services Talk - Tonight I will be presenting a talk titled What are Web Servicesfor the San Diego .NET User Group Beginner`s SIG(a synopsis of the talk is given at the end of this post). The talk starts at 6:30 and is held in an office in Del Mar, just north of the 56 and just east of the 5. In addition to hearing me babble on about Web Services for an hour and change, there will be free pizza!!! Hope to see you there! This talk will examine the fundamentals of Web services from a beginner`s perspective, focusing on the goals of Web services and common uses of Web services in industry today. It Includes a high-level look at the core Web service standards, along with live demos illustrating how to create a......

36 of 47 | Viewing WSE Trace Files - One of the neat features of Microsoft`s WSE Toolkit is that with the click of a button you can have all incoming and outgoing SOAP messages from a client or service recorded in trace files. These files, named by default InputTrace.webinfo and OutputTrace.webinfo, can be helpful for debugging or for gaining a deeper understanding as to the actual XML being scurried back and forth between a client and a Web service. One thing that`s always irked me, though, is that these trace files are simply appended to with each run. This is fine and good, I guess, but it makes it hard to pick through these logs. Every time I introduce WSE to my Web Services .NET students, I show them the tracing features,......

37 of 47 | Viewing WSE Trace Files - One of the neat features of Microsoft`s WSE Toolkit is that with the click of a button you can have all incoming and outgoing SOAP messages from a client or service recorded in trace files. These files, named by default InputTrace.webinfo and OutputTrace.webinfo, can be helpful for debugging or for gaining a deeper understanding as to the actual XML being scurried back and forth between a client and a Web service. One thing that`s always irked me, though, is that these trace files are simply appended to with each run. This is fine and good, I guess, but it makes it hard to pick through these logs. Every time I introduce WSE to my Web Services .NET students, I show them the tracing features,......

38 of 47 | Cryptic WSE 2.0 Error (WSE032 "configuration error" and System.Net.Dns.GetHostName()) - While I was teaching my .NET Web Services class tonight I stumbled upon an esoteric error with WSE 2.0 that I had not encountered before - an error that ruined two demos of mine. I had tried the demos literally 15 minutes before class and theyh worked great. When I had a full classroom, though, it crapped out. The error message I got was the standard WSE032, saying: An unhandled exception of type `System.Configuration.ConfigurationException` occured in microsoft.web.services2.dll Additional information: WSE032: There was an error loading the microsoft.web.services2 configuration section This is a pretty common error message when something has gone awry in WSE. For example, if you are using......

39 of 47 | Cryptic WSE 2.0 Error (WSE032 "configuration error" and System.Net.Dns.GetHostName()) - While I was teaching my .NET Web Services class tonight I stumbled upon an esoteric error with WSE 2.0 that I had not encountered before - an error that ruined two demos of mine. I had tried the demos literally 15 minutes before class and theyh worked great. When I had a full classroom, though, it crapped out. The error message I got was the standard WSE032, saying: An unhandled exception of type `System.Configuration.ConfigurationException` occured in microsoft.web.services2.dll Additional information: WSE032: There was an error loading the microsoft.web.services2 configuration section This is a pretty common error message when something has gone awry in WSE. For example, if you are using......

40 of 47 | Random (Perhaps Outdated) Web Service Tip for the Weekend - With the Web Service Enhancement (WSE) Toolkit it is very easy to view incoming/outgoing SOAP requests- just check the Enable Message Trace option in the option in the Diagnostics tab of the WSE Toolkit, and off you go. But prior to the WSE Toolkit, providing such essential debugging information was, unfortunately, not as straightforward or easy. Older books on Web services, for example, talk about using the SOAP Toolkit, from which you can create a SOAP proxy to record the incoming and outgoing SOAP messages. However, there`s a much easier way, as Web service-guru Michele Leroux-Bustamanteshowed me 14 months ago, almost to the day: ina Web service method, add th following code to save the ......

41 of 47 | Random (Perhaps Outdated) Web Service Tip for the Weekend - With the Web Service Enhancement (WSE) Toolkit it is very easy to view incoming/outgoing SOAP requests- just check the Enable Message Trace option in the option in the Diagnostics tab of the WSE Toolkit, and off you go. But prior to the WSE Toolkit, providing such essential debugging information was, unfortunately, not as straightforward or easy. Older books on Web services, for example, talk about using the SOAP Toolkit, from which you can create a SOAP proxy to record the incoming and outgoing SOAP messages. However, there`s a much easier way, as Web service-guru Michele Leroux-Bustamanteshowed me 14 months ago, almost to the day: ina Web service method, add th following code to save the ......

42 of 47 | Sample Chapter of my .NET Web Services DVD - A few months ago I announced the release of a training DVD of mine, Beginners .NET XML Web Services 2004. This two-disc DVD covers Web Services from the ground up, showing how to create and consume Web services using Visual Studio .NET 2003 using both VB.NET and C# examples. In addition to covering the core features of Web Services - SOAP, XML serialization, WSDL, proxy classes, etc. - the DVD also explores the Web Service Enhancements (WSE), bothfrom a high-level (Chapter 12), as well as two specific examples: UsernameToken authentication (Chapter 13) and sending attachments with DIME and WS-Attachments (Chapter 14). If you are interested in learning more about this DVD, you can check ou......

43 of 47 | Sample Chapter of my .NET Web Services DVD - A few months ago I announced the release of a training DVD of mine, Beginners .NET XML Web Services 2004. This two-disc DVD covers Web Services from the ground up, showing how to create and consume Web services using Visual Studio .NET 2003 using both VB.NET and C# examples. In addition to covering the core features of Web Services - SOAP, XML serialization, WSDL, proxy classes, etc. - the DVD also explores the Web Service Enhancements (WSE), bothfrom a high-level (Chapter 12), as well as two specific examples: UsernameToken authentication (Chapter 13) and sending attachments with DIME and WS-Attachments (Chapter 14). If you are interested in learning more about this DVD, you can check ou......

44 of 47 | Is There Anything More Self-Conscious than Watching Yourself - My latest book is out, but this time it`s not a book - it`s a DVD. About two and a half months ago Istarted talkingwith DVPress, a company that makes technical training DVDs, and decided to participate in creating a DVD targetted toward those interested in learning the fundamentals of .NET Web Services. I flew out to Houston at the end of May, and spent two days filming the seven or so hours of training that`s on the two-disc DVD. Yesterday I received the 20 author`s copies and, naturally, sat down to watch myself. The verdict I don`t like the way my voice sounds (although I already knew that). Anywho, if you are interested in learning about .NET Web services, or know someone who is, or jus......

45 of 47 | Is There Anything More Self-Conscious than Watching Yourself - My latest book is out, but this time it`s not a book - it`s a DVD. About two and a half months ago Istarted talkingwith DVPress, a company that makes technical training DVDs, and decided to participate in creating a DVD targetted toward those interested in learning the fundamentals of .NET Web Services. I flew out to Houston at the end of May, and spent two days filming the seven or so hours of training that`s on the two-disc DVD. Yesterday I received the 20 author`s copies and, naturally, sat down to watch myself. The verdict I don`t like the way my voice sounds (although I already knew that). Anywho, if you are interested in learning about .NET Web services, or know someone who is, or jus......

46 of 47 | New Article on UsernameToken Authentication with the WSE 2.0 Toolkit - The latest 4Guys article was published today, and looks at implementing UsernameToken authentication using the WSE 2.0 Toolkit. In an earlier article I wrote about the Web Service Enhancements (WSE), a set of extended Web service standards defined to help businesses implement common Web service needs not addressed by the core standards (such as security and messaging). Anywho, Microsoft has been kind enough to create a free toolkit to assist developers in implementing the WSE standards. This toolkit, called the WSE 2.0 Toolkit, was officially RTMed back at TechEd this year (which I blogged about). The main bulk of the WSE 2.0 standards address security standards. Using WSE, one can implemen......

47 of 47 | New Article on UsernameToken Authentication with the WSE 2.0 Toolkit - The latest 4Guys article was published today, and looks at implementing UsernameToken authentication using the WSE 2.0 Toolkit. In an earlier article I wrote about the Web Service Enhancements (WSE), a set of extended Web service standards defined to help businesses implement common Web service needs not addressed by the core standards (such as security and messaging). Anywho, Microsoft has been kind enough to create a free toolkit to assist developers in implementing the WSE standards. This toolkit, called the WSE 2.0 Toolkit, was officially RTMed back at TechEd this year (which I blogged about). The main bulk of the WSE 2.0 standards address security standards. Using WSE, one can implemen......