All posts by : meta-douglasp

1 of 69 | WCF RSS/ATOM Endpoints for dasBlog - One of the nice things about my group is that everyone codes, including the managers. Omri is the PUM (product unit manager) of my team.  He manages 100+ folks during the day (along with deciding what we are going to build) and codes at night. His latest effort, WCF RSS/Atom endpoints for dasBlog, is not complete: https://www.gazitt.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,41639897-259e-4178-a185-a368243d5204.aspx ...

2 of 69 | servicereg.com -   What is servicereg.com? This is an experiment to see if we can create a search engine/registry for web services. I am a developer.  How do I use this thing? You can use this one of two ways.  First, you can use servicereg.com to search for services that you in use in your own applications.  For example, if you wanted to write a stock picker application and need a list of the Fortune 500, you could find a service that offers that information here.  Second, you can register your own services with servicereg.com.  This will allow other developer to “mash-up” your service/data and cr......

3 of 69 | WS-Discovery - VipulM has posted a WS-Discovery implementation at http://wcf.netfx3.com/files/folders/protocol_channels/entry7909.aspx. I call WS-Discovery the "once and future feature" of WCF.  We had a team of folks working on discovery in v1, but "schedules happen", so we made a really, really hard call to cut it from v1. I think you will be seeing more of discovery (not just WS-Discovery) in future releases of WCF... ...

4 of 69 | My Own Soft Drink Machine - Chris Sells gave me a Christmas gift -- one of the best in memory.  He bought me my very own soft drink machine. A few years ago, Chris and I gave a talk at the PDC.  Chris has an incredible blog posting about it: How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love the Reboot. We bulit an Avalon and Indigo app that was a "soft drink configurator" that allowed you to design your own drinks.  When Chris saw this, he was compelled to buy one for Don and I. Thanks Chris!! (In case you are wondering, I gave Chris the greatest book ever written: The Illuminatus! Trilogy) ...

5 of 69 | Implementing Atom Publishing Protocol, Part 5.5 - Simon Fell just left me a little Objective-C/Cocoa hint in the comments to my last post. I have been trying out a lot of feed readers in the past months and I somehow lost his entry, but I have now re-subscribed (I have settled on Google Reader, of course). It looks like he has a good case of the Objective-C addiction too. To return the favor...  Simon: I use Quicken on the Mac.  It is nothing like Money.  Worth spending money on (pun intended). Based on Simon's advice, the new API is: @interface AtomClient : NSObject     -(XmlDocument*) feedAt: (NSURL*) aURL;     -(XmlElement*) addEntry: (XmlElement*) anEntry to: (NSURL*)......

6 of 69 | The "Slash-dot" Problem, Part 5 - I ported my "dots for XML" to Objective-C/Cocoa from Smalltalk in the previous post (Part 4).  I was going to start porting my "slashes for objects" (see Part 3 for more details) in-between working on my APP implementation.  Before I really got started, I was really surprised to learn that Objective-C/Cocoa largely has this scenario already covered. Check out the below code:     Person* douglasp = [Person new];     [douglasp setName:@"douglasp"];     [douglasp setAge: [NSNumber numberWithInt: 35]];     [[douglasp address] setStreet: @"One Microsoft Way"];         NSLog(@"St......

7 of 69 | Implementing Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), Part 3 - I have somewhat complete APP implementation done.  I posted here: AtomPub.zip (255.06 KB).  This solution requires VS 2005 or C# Express.  To see it in action, run the solution and hit http://localhost:55231/Web/fortune500.atomcollection. Creating a new collection is really easy, you just add a new file to the vdir with the .atomcollection suffix and ensure that contains a basic "template" for the feed:    < feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">>       < title>2006 Fortune 500</title>>       < subtitle&g......

8 of 69 | SOA isn't complex, you're dumb :-) - [Via Stephen Shankland]: "Guns don't kill people, the SOA WS-* stack kills people." & "If a tree falls in the forest, SOA knows about it." There are some really classic statements here. http://soafacts.com/ ...

9 of 69 | WCF Ships, Doug Purdy Dances, and Don Box Sings - The Channel 9 folks came over last week and this is the result. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=256597   ...

10 of 69 | "Static" Web Services - If you have read my Fortune 500 and Inventing the Future posts, you know that I really want to make it easy to find Web services. It turns out that I was really talking about two different things in both of those posts, although I didn't know it at the time. What I said: Finding Web services should be easy. What I should have said:  Finding Web services should be easy and they should be easy to create. It turns out that Yasser was ahead of me and then John Udell brought it home. On the Indigo team, we have done a lot of work to make creating web services easy -- if you know how to write code.  Now that we hav......

11 of 69 | "Static" Web Services, Part II - Continuing from "Static" Web Services, Part I... You can get the Excel worksheet with the Feed Exporter at http://www.douglasp.com/tools/Feed%20Template.xlt. Enable macros and run the ExportToRss macro. I'll be making some improvements in this when I get a chance (APP support, support for my search thing -- coming soon, enclosure/microformats, etc.) I am mainly doing this as an exercise to show folks what I think we should be doing. The ideal thing is if Excel (and the all the other apps that make sense) supports File | Save As Feed. ...

12 of 69 | "Static" Web Services, Part II - Continuing from "Static" Web Services, Part I... You can get the Excel worksheet with the Feed Exporter at http://www.douglasp.com/tools/Feed%20Template.xlt. Enable macros and run the ExportToRss macro. I'll be making some improvements in this when I get a chance (APP support, support for my search thing -- coming soon, enclosure/microformats, etc.) I am mainly doing this as an exercise to show folks what I think we should be doing. The ideal thing is if Excel (and the all the other apps that make sense) supports File | Save As Feed. ...

13 of 69 | Indigo is done! - Today is one of the happiest in my professional career. Indigo, now Windows Communication Foundation (part of .Net Framework 3.0), is done.  We released it to MSDN today for Windows XP and Win2k3 (click here to install).  Indigo ships with Vista as well (coming soon, I promise). I have been working on this product for 4.5 years.  It was a long road, but it was worth it.  Indigo will be the key framework for distributed computing (WS-*, REST, whatever) on the Microsoft plaftform for many years to come. Indigo is something that I am proud of, but even more so, I am proud of the team that built it. One ......

14 of 69 | Inventing the Future - "The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" -- Alan Kay I was pretty fired up about my experience trying to find a service that provided a list of the Fortune 500. I came into work today telling everyone that I talked to about how we need to go fix this and some half-baked ideas that I have around doing it. One of the most interesting questions that I got around this was from my wife: "What about UDDI?" I told her to go to either the Microsoft or IBM public UDDI sites. I'll refer you to the IBM site for the answer that I gave my wife. I a......

15 of 69 | Fortune 500 - I am trying to write an simple app that will help me with my stock portfolio. One of the imputs that I need is a list of the Fortune 500. I have been searching for around 10 minutes now, but I can't seem to find a single 'web service' that provides this list. For the sake of this posting, 'web service' == something I can issue an HTTP Get/Post to and get back some data in an non-HTML format (XML, JSON, CSV, whatever). I am going to keep looking. If I don't find one, I am going to write one and put it on this site. The fact that I can't just google for a service that does this tells me that we have a long, long way to go. ...

16 of 69 | Vista RC1 (with a new laptop) - I got a new laptop on Thursday (a HP nc8430). I installed Vista RC1 on Friday (btw: WCF RC1 is available now). It looks like a Windows Experience Index # of 4.2. I am very impressed -- very impressed indeed with the combo. ...

17 of 69 | HyperCard - Hypercard was released on this day in 1987 according to Apple Matters.  I bring up HyperCard all the time at work, since 1) I love all things Apple (including the Peforma line) 2) I think that it was a milestone on the path that I am treading. When folks ask me what I want to do in my career in this industry, my refrain is well-worn:  "To make my mother a programmer".  Making enough money to send my kids to college and retire is important, but that is not the high order bit.  Simply put, I want everyone to be able to program a computer. In order to do this, I think that there are three high-level things that need to ......

18 of 69 | Random Stuff: REST vs. WS Statistics - Stefan Tilkov has an interesting list at http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2006/07/31/rest_vs_ws_statistics.html. ...

19 of 69 | Connected Developer Blog Report - I think that Clemens posted one of my previous feed searches.  I am likely to keep posting these as I run them moving forward. Workflow Workflow Changes Part Three: tracking stream based [2006.07.20 07:30:00] -- Workflows and stuff... Workflow Changes Part two: workarounds for the custom activities with locked children [2006.07.19 17:39:00] -- Workflows and stuff... Workflow Changes (aka Dynamic Updates) Part one: UI-based changes [2006.07.19 11:40:00] -- Workflows and stuff... Instance state and per-instance Title property handling [2006.07.13 07:51:00] -- Workflows and stuff... Basics of Working with Custom......

20 of 69 | KennyW: Washing the SOAP from Messages - Kenny, our super dev on the Core Communications feature team, talks about how POX works in WCF now. http://kennyw.com/indigo/132 ...

21 of 69 | How we (I) think about SOAP vs. REST - I was included in a thread today about how we think about SOAP and REST. Since we took a couple of DCRs in Indigo and changed our positioning around REST/POX/..., this question has come up a few times. I typically point folks to something I wrote back in Sept. 2005: http://www.douglasp.com/blog/2005/09/26/ProtocolIntegration.aspx. In short, we support it all, use what you need -- in many cases you need SOAP -- so use. If you don't need it, then don't use it -- but you should still using Indigo. ;-) ...

22 of 69 | Rhapsody Web Services - I am spending some time with the Rhapsody Web Services. I have had issues with the Rhapsody product and website in terms of playing songs -- but the web services stuff seems fairly cool so far. ...

23 of 69 | Using the WCF RSS Toolkit - I just did a quick port of Yasser's toolkit to our latest daily bits -- I am working on something super secret. ;-) SMaine is going a "full" port -- which I am hoping that he releases when the next CTP comes out. If you haven't checked out what Yasser did -- you should -- it really shows the power of Indigo. ...

24 of 69 | TypeForwardedTo - My good friend Yasser is no longer running the Indigo versioning basic. I'll let him tell you why, but needless to say, I think it is revenge for me offering him the "opportunity" to drive this area of the product serveral years ago (he did a wonderful job, BTW). Since we are so close to shipping Indigo, I decided that I would just take it over for the next couple months instead of having someone else drive it. The last thing that we wanted to ensure before we shipped, with regard to versioning, was that we would have some flexiblity to refactor what assemblies our types reside in after we ship -- without breaking any existing......

25 of 69 | WCF RSS Toolkit - http://wcf.netfx3.com/blogs/news_and_announcements/archive/2006/06/13/Windows-Communication-Foundation-RSS-Toolkit.aspx You'll be seeing alot more of this (RSS support that is)... Great work, YasserS.. ...

26 of 69 | WCF RSS Toolkit - http://wcf.netfx3.com/blogs/news_and_announcements/archive/2006/06/13/Windows-Communication-Foundation-RSS-Toolkit.aspx You'll be seeing alot more of this (RSS support that is)... Great work, YasserS... ...

27 of 69 | WCF RSS Toolkit - http://wcf.netfx3.com/blogs/news_and_announcements/archive/2006/06/13/Windows-Communication-Foundation-RSS-Toolkit.aspx You'll be seeing alot more of this (RSS support that is)... Great work, YasserS.. ...

28 of 69 | WCF & RSS - As we ramp down v1 & start talking about v.Next, you are going to see more of the below. Same data – same exact user code – completely different protocols - only changing config. ...

29 of 69 | WCF & RSS - As we ramp down v1 & start talking about v.Next, you are going to see more of the below. Same data – same exact user code – completely different protocols - only changing config. ...

30 of 69 | Doing Remoting over WCF - By default, WCF doesn't support passing references or preserving object graphs like Remoting. That doesn't mean you can't do it -- we actually designed WCF to support all the Remoting semantics. In fact, at PDC 2003, we shipped System.Remoting that was layered on top of the loosely coupled stuff. We decided not to ship that, but you can stuff do Remoting over WCF. Sowmy talks about how to do graphs at http://blogs.msdn.com/sowmy/archive/2006/03/26/561188.aspx. Michael talks about how to do references at http://blogs.msdn.com/mjm/archive/2005/05/12/417035.aspx. Note that the latest bits (not the public ones) will require a slig......

31 of 69 | Microsoft Soap Interop Server - What to know if your favorite Web services stack interops with Microsoft? ASMX: http://mssoapinterop.org WCF: http://mssoapinterop.org/ilab/ Have fun... ...

32 of 69 | Schema Profile - One of the questions I get asked a lot: "What XSD constructs does WCF (Indigo) support?" The answer is simple:  all of them. The devil, of course, is in the details. Indigo support three different "data" programming models. System.ServiceModel.Message The legacy XmlSerializer programming model The new [DataContract] programming model (and, by closure, the legacy [Serializable] programming model) #1 is the "ur" data programming model for Indigo -- all XML, all the time. This programming model supports every XSD in the world. The other two models are just strongly-typed "views" over the Me......

33 of 69 | WCF & Partial Trust - Schedules happen. There are a lot of features that we wish we could do, but at some stage we need to ship. This is the reason that WCF doesn't support any partial trust scenarios in v1. So what can you do if you need to support a partially trusted WPF client communicating to a WCF service? It turns out we have an answer for v1:  use an ASMX proxy. All you need to do is configure a WCF endpoint with the BasicHttpBinding and use your favorite proxy creation tool (VS Add Web Reference or disco.exe/wsdl.exe) to create a partial trust proxy. We'll see what we can do to address this scenario in a better way in Orcas. ...

34 of 69 | From HTML to Services: Building a Site for REST, POX, AJAX, RSS, SOAP, and WS-* - It looks like I'll be giving a talk at Mix'06. https://content.mix06.com/content/SessionView.aspx?SessionID=906f55cb-0d75-44e0-86d1-16ae78c6f267 ...

35 of 69 | WCF Forums - If you haven't done so -- check out the WCF Forum on MSDN. http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=118&SiteID=1 If you have a question about Indigo, I can promise an answer. ...

36 of 69 | What is Indigo - A few months ago I was at an unnamed conference. I took the below photo at the Microsoft booth. Apparently Indigo is some chip on a motorboard. ;-) ...

37 of 69 | Firewire - Tonight I needed to transfer two large files from one Mac to another. The wireless network was an option, but this was around 10 GBs of data. I decided to use my 30GB iPod as a sneaker net. It turns out that by TiBook (built in 2001) doesn`t have USB 2, so the transfer was slow. I have a "computer part box" that would scare the hell out of you -- you should see some of the stuff that I have in there (I think I have an old 300 baud Apple modem and an Atari 2600 at the bottom actually). I went there to get a Firewire 400 to iPod connector. After I find it, I hook it up and -- bang -- the iPod says: "I don`t support FireWire..." Great. Then I rem......

38 of 69 | Dare on Indigo & REST - I just read Dare`s post about Indigo & REST. I have to give him a lot of credit here. The first time we started talking about REST/POX (with Mike Vernal), I really wanted to convince him to get on board the SOAP train. During our second or third meeting (over milkshakes and beer ;-)), I really grokked how to think about the space. Now I am running around telling everyone that Indigo (WCF) is the best REST/POX/RSS/... & SOAP platform in the world. ...

39 of 69 | IndiBlog Report for 12/10/2005 - IIS %1 is not a valid Win32 application [12/5/2005 1:58:46 PM] -- .NET Musings Indigo Teaching Indigo to do REST/POX, Part 1 [12/8/2005 8:02:10 AM] -- Clemens Vasters: Enterprise Development & Alien Abductions I am back [12/7/2005 3:22:50 PM] -- Clemens Vasters: Enterprise Development & Alien Abductions New and Notable 85 [12/7/2005 11:59:00 AM] -- Sam Gentile`s Blog You really should come be a PM on the Indigo team... [12/7/2005 5:59:51 PM] -- Brain.Save() REST/POX with Indigo [12/12/2005 3:40:42 AM] -- Paul Fallon`s Blog Reminder - Robert Scoble in Dublin - TOMORROW night! - Register now [11/30/2005 10:35:04 AM] -- Paul F......

40 of 69 | On REST/POX and Indigo - I just read Mark Baker`s post about Clemens` REST extensions for WCF. As one of the original REST-heads in the big house, this discussion interests me -- especially since I want folks to be able to write services that use the REST approach with WCF. I recently did an internal talk about WCF and RSS. In this talk, I showed a demo of a WS-Transfer RSS service exposing a HTTP/POX endpoint, a HTTP/SOAP endpoint, and a TCP/Binary SOAP endpoint. The contract looked like: [ ServiceContract]> public interface IResourceTransfer {>      [ OperationContract(Action = TRANSFER.GET, ReplyAction = TRANSFER.GETRESPONSE)]>      Message Get()......

41 of 69 | UDDI & WCF - At least once a week someone asks me one of the following questions: What is the discovery story in WCF ("Indigo") What is the future of UDDI at Microsoft Interestingly enough a single answer handles both questions: WCF discovery  == UDDI. But what about MEX and WS-Discovery, you ask First, MEX and UDDI compose well together and our guidance reflects this. In short, publish the MEX address in the UDDI store. We will even ship a nice tool in the Windows SDK (we already do, BTW) to do this for you. As for WS-Discovery, we had it in the product, but in order to get this thing out the door somethings had to be cut (I have a phrase......

42 of 69 | IndiBlog Report for 11/29/2005 - Indigo Learn WCF while skiing Utah (or in your pj`s at home) [11/22/2005 1:31:00 AM] -- Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard WinFX November 2005 CTP Links (runs on VS05 RTM) [11/21/2005 3:18:00 PM] -- Service Station, by Aaron Skonnard CLR Internals for One More Time Dec 6th [11/26/2005 5:51:00 AM] -- Sam Gentile`s Blog No Longer Doing an SOA with Indigo Book [11/26/2005 5:12:00 AM] -- Sam Gentile`s Blog Install Nov WinFX with VS2005 Final Flawless [11/20/2005 3:46:00 AM] -- Sam Gentile`s Blog A little bit about async in WCF [11/27/2005 10:16:39 AM] -- Brain.Save() Another Indigo Hosting Blogger [11/20/2005 1:11:12 PM] -- Brain.Sav......

43 of 69 | WSE3 ships! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/webservices/building/wse/default.aspx Mark and company did a wonderful job getting this release out the door. ...

44 of 69 | New WCF Project vs. New WCF Service - We are are having an discussion about our WCF v1.0 tooling story. The central question is if we should add a new set of project templates to VS. In short, when you do File | New Project...  and select a language, do you see: WCF Console Application WCF Windows Application WCF Windows Service Application All the rest of the current project templates (Class Library, Web Control Library, ...) We haven`t closed on this yet and we could use some input here. The other option (let`s call it #2) that we are discussing is just to make WCF Service an option under File | Add New Item ... In this world, you select one of th......

45 of 69 | Make Interop Real - We are hosting a WCF "PlugFest" in Redmond from Nov. 7-10. If your company implements a Web services stack -- drop by. If your company uses a Web services stack -- do you know if your vendor is coming More details at http://mssoapinterop.org/ilab/WCFInteropPlugFest_invite.doc.   ...

46 of 69 | PDC 2005 Talks - COM326 (The One about XML in WCF) & PRS334 (The One with Chris and Doug) are now available. Three notes... First, the community X30 died last week, so didn`t get a chance to confirm that all the demos work after I added the "as is" stuff. Second, the death of the X30 made it impossible for me to port the demos to VB9 (if I get another box and some time, I`ll do the port). Lastly, you need the Linq preview bits installed to compile these samples...   ...

47 of 69 | Protocol Integration - During my "XML for WCF" talk I showed ASMX and ASP.Net running on top of a WCF service. To make the demo even more interesting, I showed our existing Web services stack doing POX running inside of our new Web services stack doing POX. Before I walked through that demo, I showed the below slide: This highlights our focus on protocols as the solution, not a single runtime. That is our big bet. While we are not wed to any particular protocol, we think that XML, SOAP & XSD/WSDL add value. If we didn`t, we wouldn`t have spent the last couple of years investing in the WS-* family. That said, those protocols aren`t for everyone and every scenar......

48 of 69 | Make Dan blog - Dan has a blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/daroth/. It doesn`t have anything on it yet. You should email him at Daniel.Roth@microsoft.com to get him to post something. Dan owns the metadata feature in WCF.   ...

49 of 69 | Make John blog - John owns a big chunk of the WCF Service Framework. His blog is at http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/jjustice/default.aspx. There is nothing there. Send him email at jjustice@microsoft.com if you want him to start talking about WCF. ...

50 of 69 | My PDC Schedule - I am leaving for PDC in the morning. Below is my schedule if you are interested in talking about WCF or seeing one of my talks. Note the overlap on Friday -- I am going to try to make the last 15 minutes of the "APIs in the Sky" panel -- good thing it is in the next room over (which means that it is a mile away in LA, so I will be there for the last 7 minutes). When What Where ......