All posts by : Don Smith The Message Is King

1 of 27 | A Data Access Discussion at the Summit - I spoke this morning at the patterns & practices Summit about data access. As I described this morning, I've mostly been working in the area of Web Services for the past number of years and didn't keep up too much with the advances in data access and UI development. I'm going to be kicking off a p&p project in the coming weeks focusing squarely on your options for dealing with data in your .NET applications. As I've come to appreciate in many aspects of my life, once you get your head in the right place ... you know, that place where everything is just resonating ... well, if you can get there, everything just seems to go smoother. So I wanted to share with everyone where......

2 of 27 | Service Factory Customization Workshop - Microsoft Main Campus (Building 20)July 30th – Aug 1st 2007Redmond, WA Description Many software factories being built today use a number of different technologies, which include the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX), the Domain Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit, Visual Studio extensibility components, and a few other additional utilities. This is definitely true for the Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition. Much of the feedback we’ve received about these technologies, with regard to building and modifying software factories, revolves around the difficulty of customizing them. More than 40% of all users of the Service Factory will change it in some way before using it to build W......

3 of 27 | A time for reflection and assessment - Wow, it's hard to believe it has been almost a year since the patterns & practices team released our first software factories. Remember when the early customer previews were called Baseline Architecture Toolkits? Oh, the nostalgia :) We could have had so much fun with the BAT acronym ... haha. So that means now is a perfect time to take a quick assessment on how we're doing so far ... that's right, a survey. Now hold on a second! At least hear me out for the rest of the paragraph. I can't devulge too much detail yet, but some team in Microsoft might be in the middle of building some serious software factory infrastructure for a future version of Visual Studio -......

4 of 27 | First Service Factory v3 Community Drop - Okay, we're off and running now. Earlier today I posted the first of many community drops for Service Factory v3 - don't let "build 19" fool you - this is the first one. It took us longer than expected to get this one out the door, but we're all set now. I suspect the first question you have is "What is so specially about this release?" Fair enough question. Well, probably the biggest thing is the addition of models. This alone accounts for most of the improvements over v2. I'm not going to go into too much detail here (there will be plenty of time for that later), but here are the high points: Now Visual Studio has a memory about your decisions. In v2 you plac......

5 of 27 | ... come and get yer Service Factory! - That's right ladies and gentlemen, the December release of the Web Service Software Factory and a VB.NET version is now available for your consumption, modification, and production pleasures :) Okay, I'm just going to do 3 things in this post since I know there will be many more to follow: Lay some links on ya. For downloading the Service Factory releases and more info. Share my favorite new features of the Service Factory with you. Give you a sense of what is to come in the near and not-so-near future. Links Service Factory December release helps you build both WCF and ASMX services in C#. The old July release is no longer available since everything it contained ......

6 of 27 | Handcrafting WCF-friendly WSDLs - It's 10:15 pm and I'm still in the office, but I really think I should get this entry posted before I head home - or it won't ever get posted. I was supposed to be working on my demo for my Service Factory session at the SOA Conference tomorrow, but I got side-tracked early in the day when I started playing with a new feature of Service Factory (that I'm going to demo). This new recipe (hereforth referred to as "the new recipe") allows you to create the service interface, data contracts, and a stub of the service implementation from an existing WSDL document. Yeah, pretty cool, huh? Of course you can do the same thing in svcutil if you have the .NET 3.0 SDK installed, but you have to leave ......

7 of 27 | Bumbershoot was awesome! - For those of you who don't live in the northwest of the U.S., there is a music and arts festival every Labor Day weekend in downtown Seattle called Bumbershoot that is a must-attend if you're in the area. For music lovers like myself, this is 3 days of music utopia, but there are a lot of other things to do too. This was my first year attending, and I only went on Sunday and Monday since I had chores to do on Saturday, but now I wish I could have figured out how to go on Saturday too - the festival completely exceeded my expectations! I was mostly interested in the music, but I did take a break for some local comedy yesterday. Harrold Gomez had the whole place in stiches. If you h......

8 of 27 | WCF Guidance Packages now available for consumption - If you've been following the Service Factory project, you'll know that we had to put the WCF guidance on hold for a little while as we were getting the ASMX Service Factory released. Well ever since it was released, we've been working on getting caught up on the WCF guidance. This actually took longer than expected because in addition to making the WCF Feb CTP -> July CTP changes we felt the need to fix a bunch of the bugs we identified in the similar ASMX GPs so now there is some fidelity between the two. Is this release of the Service Factory going to go down like the last one? You know, that is a great question. If you mean, "Are you going to release regularly to the community?" and "......

9 of 27 | Service Factory now available for download! - Before I get ahead of myself, which comes pretty easy for me J, here’s the link to learn more about and download the Service Factory.   Wow, I’ve been waiting 8 months to write this blog entry. After months of planning, arguing, development, sleep deprivation, testing, writing, and making sure all of that wasn’t in vain, the Service Factory has actually made it onto MSDN. Since this is MY blog, I feel like I can be more personal than the other announcements I’ve written recently. This release actually means quite a lot to me. Not only is it the first p&p deliverable I’ve been involved in from the VERY beginning, but I truly believe it will revolutionize the way organizations bui......

10 of 27 | How Teams Build Services - With all this talk of software factories, it's important that we understand the different ways teams will use them to build services. I talk to a lot of customers and, of course, there are several different approaches a team might choose. I hope this post will be informative, but hopefully, the comments will also identify new approaches and/or confirm the ones below. When building a solution that involves distributed services, there are a number of things the team must build: the service interface (operations and their messages), the business logic (domain model entities and processing logic), the data access layer, the proxy/service agent that consumes the service, and......

11 of 27 | Live Service Factory Webcast announcement - I'm going to do a webcast on the Web Service Software Factory in the morning (11am EST). The link below will work if you want to tune in and ask questions live and it should also work about 24 hours after it's over to view on demand. Hope you can tune in. http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032300719&Culture=en-US...

12 of 27 | New drop of the Web Service Software Factory available! - I could go on and on about how this new drop includes a guidance package to help you build business entities from your data model, CRUD sprocs from those same data entities and data repository classes to help you persist business entities. Becuase this drop has been updated to the latest version of GAT/GAX, I could also talk about all the new stuff like the Guidance Navigator. But rather than do this, I would rather you not spend anymore time here on my blog and just go to the Service Factory Community Workspace and download it. Be sure and let us know what you think....

13 of 27 | Issuing SAML tokens from an STS using WSE 3.0 - I thought for sure I blogged about this ... man, that means this is like 13 days late ... geez. Well, lucky for you we're not going to pull it off the Web anytime soon. Hopefully you heard about it over on Jason's blog. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me introduce you to the SAML STS  for WSE 3.0 QuickStart. To download it, just join and login to the workspace - you'll see the link in the Downloads section. This project is an extension of the Web Service Security guide we released last year. In that guide, there is a brokered authentication design pattern for a Security Token Service (STS). This is a great place to start if you're not familiar with the role of an ......

14 of 27 | The first of many ARCasts on Web Service Security - Just got the email from Ron that he's just posted an ARCast on Web service security. I'm listening to the ARCast now ... this was created from a webcast Ron, Jason, and Fred did in September titled Web Services Security Patterns (Level 300). I was supposed to be on this one, but something came up at the last minute ... so they make fun of me of course. About 3 weeks or so ago, I got doppler and Window Media Player set up with my iRiver H10 so now I'm automatically pulling down Ron's ARCast and DotNetRocks! so I can tune in on my way to work ... and when I'm on those cool Eliptical machines in the gym. Are there are cool podcasts that .NET developers are list......

15 of 27 | Web Service Security Webcasts/ARCasts - On Wednesday, Dwayne Taylor, Mark Fussell, Ron Jacobs, and I recorded a live MSDN Webcasts titled Securing Web Services with X.509 Certificates in WSE 3.0. This webcast is based on the Web Service Security guide we released last month. If you are interested in this stuff, you'll REALLY be doing yourself a disservice if you don't check it out - it is so much more than how to decide between X.509, Kerberos, and Username tokens. Anyway, we think the webcast turned out really well, we had a lot of fun doing it, and now it's available on-demand for your viewing pleasure right here. I know you're probably thinking, "what's up with telling us about a LIVE webcasts a......

16 of 27 | How confident are you - If you are building connected systems, how confident are you that Microsoft is doing the right thing for you Are you confident that we`re in the process of publishing the right tools and guidance that will make you more successful when building connected systems Are you confident that the next version of Visual Studio, BizTalk Server, the .NET Framework, and the tools and libraries will address what you think is lacking in the current suite of products and technologies We want you to be confident that we are ... seriously. So we`ve created a survey that will give you an opportunity to be heard - and make a difference. The patterns & practices team has worked with the Visual Studio, BizTalk,......

17 of 27 | What-We-Are-Up-To Webcast - I`m sitting here with Ron Jacobs, Eugenio Pace, and Tom Hollander in the MS Studios as we`re getting setup to do this live webcast about what each of us is up to here in patterns & practices. You see, Eugenio owns the smart client program, Tom owns the line of business program and I own the Integration & Web Services program. Unfortunately I don`t have a link to the webcast right now, but I`ll be sure to post the link to the on-demand version (as soon as I get it) in the comments section of this entry. You`ll want to check this out if you don`t attend it live ... I`m sure it`s going to be a good time and heck, you`ll even be able to learn what we each having coming down the pipe......

18 of 27 | You`re out of excuses - Admittedly this guide is probably late for some of you ... but others of you still have VB6 apps out there that you need to evolve, manage, and support ... wouldn`t it be easier if they were .NET apps Chances are, you`ve decided that your new development will be in .NET, but it sure would be nice if application XYZ was on .NET, huh Well, Eugenio has come to your rescue. patterns & practices has just released a VB6 migration guide to its community. If you have VB6 apps you plan to migrate, don`t do it without checkin` out this guide. If you`ve already migrated your VB6 apps and had some particularly sticky hangups, be sure others can learn from your experiences by letting that tea......

19 of 27 | What document-oriented means to me - I`m WAY behind on my blog reading (and writing) ... so, in an attempt to recify that, I`m going back and reading a bunch of old posts. Way back in January, Tim was postulating on what document-oriented really means. And since I have a viewpoint about this ... To me, document-oriented (also called message-oriented or message-centric) is less about programming models or on-the-wire representations and more about the developer`s mindset. I recommend all Web service developers try to change the way they think about distributed solutions ... especially if they`ve come from a DCOM, Remoting, etc. background. When you`re not thinking in terms of messages, certain inappropriate concepts can seep in......

20 of 27 | Dynamic portTypes and Grid Computing - I was onsite with a customer the other day discussing the architecture of one of their future applications. I was only there for the day, so we obviously couldn`t go into too much depth. They just wanted a sanity check to make sure they weren`t going in the wrong direction at a high level. One of the interesting things about their design is it accounted for some grid computing principles. Behind the service facade, they incorporate a series of message handlers that are invoked based on the wsa:Action (yes, they`re using the WSE messaging API behind the curtain). They have conciously created a separation between the operations and the service interface (I`ll explain what I mean). In most We......

21 of 27 | WSDL.EXE problem with BEA WSDL - As it turns out, using the 1.x builds of the .NET Framework, wsdl.exe (and VS.NET) are sometimes unable to process perfectly good WSDL documents generated from the latest versions of BEA WebLogic Workshop. If the WSDL contains multiple schemas, and any have the same targetNamespace as another, you`ll get something like, "a schema with the namespace `urn:foo-bar" has already been added." There are not currently plans to fix this behavior in the 1.x versions of the framework. The product group is, however, planning to fix it in 2.0 (although it`s not yet in beta 1 yet). Since I know at least 2 large Microsoft customers have hit this problem, I thought someone else might find this XS......

22 of 27 | A VS.NET Add-In for "Contract First" development - Disclaimer: There is a good chance you have already heard of this Add-In and/or the concept of contract-first development of Web Services. I just felt I would be remiss for not having a link to it ... even if it has existed longer than this blog has. Heck, even if I`ve just made it easier to find, I`ve done my part. As I`ve said before, if you`re designing and developing Web Services, the most important thing you should be thinking about is what that XML message will look like on the wire. The easiest way to do that is to create the WSDL document first. I know this isn`t very intuitive the first couple of times, but if you`re comfortable with XSD, you can probably copy/paste/modify......

23 of 27 | Versioning Web Service Parameters - Dare makes a few comments about one of my previous posts so I thought - in true blogsphere fashion - I`d follow-up in a new post. First I`ll mention a few more things about versioning web services, then I`ll get to Dare`s comments. Versioning web services can be very challenging depending on the results you`re trying to achieve. The primary decisions revolve around compatibility. First scenario, the easy way out: no compatibility. If you choose this route, it is highly recommended you implement a breaking change so your intentions are clear. So, for the next version of your service, you change the namespace, create a new endpoint address, and (re)deploy the clients for that servic......

24 of 27 | MSN Spaces Goes Beta - This is huge! I`m actually writing this entry before the beta goes into effect (about 4 hours from now), but I can`t post it until 9 pm PST. I only know about it because of an internal email from Mike Torres. So, I`m guessing the blogsphere will light up with activity tonight and tomorrow. I`m really excited about this release. The technology and social use cases for blogging have evolved considerably in the past few years. It`ll be exciting to see how Spaces will let people express themselves. I`m not going to list all of the features here - you can go the site for that or see what Dare has to say about it if you`re curious. These are the first things I want to find out about it:......

25 of 27 | One parameter to rule them all: Part 2 - In my post yesterday, I recommended that Web Service operations should only have a single input parameter rather than multiple for the sake of versioning. In the comments of that post, Todd makes some really good points why having multiple parameters isn`t such a bad thing. Rather than responding in comment form, I thought [since I want to illustrate with code snippets] I`d just respond with a new entry. The fact that it also makes my new blog look more active isn`t a bad thing either :-) One of the most important considerations when designing Web Service endpoints is the message ... the XML on the wire. This is where the rubber meets the road. Decisions at this point will impact ......

26 of 27 | Two Web Service "Don`ts" - There are at least 2 things I`m still seeing in some web service implementations we should not be seeing. In my first post, Refactoring XSLT, I was shooting for original ... interesting ... maybe even useful ... but not a best practice (at least not until more testing is done). In this post I`m writing about 2 best practices - independent of the platform (.NET, J2EE, etc) being used. One of them you`ve [hopefully] heard 1000 times and this will be your 1001st. You might not have heard the other one before ... or at least heard the rationale behind it. Don`t code on the edge Web Services are essentially the buttons and textboxes other applications use to access some functionality. ......

27 of 27 | Refactoring XSLT - I guess a quick introduction wouldn`t be completely out of order for a first post. My name is Don Smith and I`ve been a Dev Consultant at Microsoft in Charlotte, NC for just over 5 years now. I spend most of my time helping our customers to be successful with Microsoft`s XML technologies (XSLT, XSD, etc.), Web Services, and distributed architectures. I`ve been blogging for several years, but I`m just now deciding to join the MSDN blog party. Would love to hear from you if you feel so moved. :-) Refactoring XSLT is a concept that originally dawned on me while delivering an XML development workshop earlier this year. Here`s a touch of background. According to Martin Fowler, Refactori......