All posts by : Softwaremaker (WSE)

1 of 127 | All about WSDL, Types and Section 5 Encoding (again) - Ahhh ... it has been a while, hasnt it ? My life is just torn between working with bits of 2, beats of 4 and nucleotides of 4. But while challenging, it has been really fun. As spoken to a friend today, my passions in life seeks out to expand the comfort boundaries of gray matter, which we called the mind and to constantly challenge and stimulate the brain to learn and absorb new things that one would never think of learning if one boxed themself in a virtual space, which techies like me would call "typecast". One example that I highlighted to my friend today, which I respectfully pointed out to them that he falls under, is when he said: "But we tech people are not go......

2 of 127 | Hi-Def AVCHD Video Format Processing for mere mortals ... - I had recently purchased a Canon Hi-Def Flash Camcorder HF100 at wholesale price (please dont ask me how much and where I got it from). There was a long thought process before this high-end purchase. I knew I wanted a camcorder to record in Hi-Def (HD) format. The question I had was the recorded video format. I did some research and poking around and there were some pros and cons that I was seriously considering such as: What is the recording storage medium ? What is the recording format ? If answer to [1] was a DV Tape or sort, then the answer would probably be HDV/MPEG-2 format. Do I have enought processing power / software infrastructure to deal with the answ......

3 of 127 | Windows Workflow Foundation: MultiThreaded Parallelism - I remember back in 2005/2006 when I was still touring the APAC circuits such as Sydney (Australia) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) doing training and consulting gigs for customers, partners about Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo) and some of the initial Windows Workflow questions came up regarding the use of Parallel Activities. It came as a surprise to many people that parallel activities are not independently asynchronous. I explained that a WF instance gets only one instance from the runtime. There are reasons for this single-threaded execution model so each activity have to work with this single thread effic......

4 of 127 | BizTalk 2006: BizTalk Server Operations Guide is available live - If you make your living installing, deploying, managing and operating Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006. I guarantee that you will be excited and be thankful for the availability of the BizTalk Server Operations Guide. So, what's in it ?  Guidance based on real-world experience. The idea for the guide originated with Microsoft field representatives, partner organizations, and customers who plan, deploy, and maintain BizTalk Server installations. This group of IT professionals has accumulated extensive hands-on experience with a diverse range of BizTalk solutions. As they gained experience they created checklists, best practices, and presentations to guide future BizTalk Serv......

5 of 127 | BizTalk 2006: Business Activity Monitoring Portal Enabled But Not Configurable - Problem: If you are in the configuration screen of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and you are configuring Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Portal, you checked 'Enable BAM Portal" and you noticed that the Account and Windows Group options are still grayed out. Cause: I suspect that if you have configured BAM Portal once from any server in the BizTalk Server group, the user account fields are disabled on the rest of the servers even though Enable BAM Portal option is still available. Resolution: Reset BAMVRoot in the BAM config file: BAMConfig.xml and then run BM update-config Used bm.exe to get the BAM configuration XML: Open a command window Go to C:......

6 of 127 | Differences between the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Line-Of-Business (LOB) Adapter Pack and the BizTalk Adapter Framework - With the impending release of the Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapter Pack (Beta 2 available here), there are some confusions as to the differences between the BizTalk Adapter Pack, Microsoft's WCF Line of Business (LOB) Adapter SDK, and of course, the (older) BizTalk Adapter Framework. In a nutshell, the BizTalk Adapter Pack is written and developed on top of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK (which is free and freely downloadable). The value-add is that the LOBs that it can integrate with ootb are SAP (mySAP Business Suite), ORACLE (Oracle Database) and SIEBEL (Siebel eBusiness Applications). Of course, a lot of grunt work is taken away from you, as explained here. One of......

7 of 127 | OASIS and the WS-Federation Specifications - Finally, OASIS announced last week that it is calling for participation for Web Services Federation. The formation of the WS-Federation Technical Committee is announced here. WS-Fed is an important addition to the WS-* protocol suite that enables users to sign-in seamlessly to systems outside of their own organization without requiring (more) new usernames and passwords using Single-Sign-On (SSO) between separate organizations with an established trust relationship. WS-Fed builds upon and composes with other WS-* protocols: WS-Fed extends WS-Trust WS-Fed composes with WS-Security and WS-SecureConversation to ensure data integrity and privacy WS-Fed composes......

8 of 127 | Windows Communication Foundation AND Compact Framework - While I was still an Microsoft MVP and a Microsoft Regional Director, one of the things I have always requested is to have Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo) run in the Compact Framework to enable ease of use of WS-Security Specifications in distributed (W3C) SOAP communications. I mean, really - even Web Services Enhancements (WSE) did not work at the Compact Framework level. One of my friends and a really technically-brillant guy, Casey Chesnut cooked something up to enable us to use secured communications on the compact framework (which I used). Now, I guess the CF in WCF means it can work in the Compact Framework now, finally. Thi......

9 of 127 | WS-ReliableMessaging Simplified - WHAT and HOW ? - This is a continuation of my previous post: WS-ReliableMessaging Simplified - WHY While this blog sits in my draft folder while I am busy solving and fire-fighting other real-world problems, I just found out that my fellow distributed and connected systems enthusiast, Matevz has penned down the WHATs and HOWs of WS-ReliableMessaging faster than me, AND with even greater details !!! So, instead of replicating that effort, it would be better for me to do a high level post about the HOWs of WS-ReliableMessaing. The below diagram of WS-ReliableMessaging explains the sequencing really well.   Let me explain the concepts of WS-ReliableMessaging in terms of a......

10 of 127 | BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and WCF Integration - These are just some of the tabs that can be found if you expose a Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 process via a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo) Service. The interesting part of the Messaging Tab of BizTalk 2006 R2 is that you are able to dictate the source of the inbound message body that you would like BizTalk to handle. You can specify it to be the entire <soap:Envelope> or just the <soap:Body>, which essentially strips out the <soap:Header> element from the entire envelope. The flexibility comes in when you can dictate and customize the message content via an XPath expression that you would like BizTalk......

11 of 127 | [Stay Tuned]: BPEL, Windows Worflow Foundation and BizTalk - I have been involved in a couple of pretty good competitive bids in some public tenders recently and am thoroughly enjoying it. I have come head-to-head with the usual suspects of heavy hitters in the areas of collaboration, SOA / ESB and portal plays such as IBM, Oracle and the likes. On another related note: Since I am in the compete space recently, I have been keeping watch on what is coming out of the standards body and I think that WS-BPEL (which was BPEL4WS ...) should have their specifications ready by next month (March 2007). Having said that, one of the points that will make Microsoft a even stronger challenger in the enterprise space is what I believ......

12 of 127 | WS-ReliableMessaging Simplified - WHY ? - It is amazing to note the reach to the masses of a single MSDN Webcast. I had conducted a MSDN Webcast titled: "Acks and NAcks: Why We Need the Principles of TCP/IP Reliability in SOAP" in mid-2006 and till this day, I am still receiving questions and feedback about that topic I presented in the webcast. (Incidentally, you can view the on-demand webcast here.) For those of you who do not want to go through this webcast again, I am going to break that presentation into the WHYs, WHATs and HOWs on this blog. This will make for easy-reading and straight-to-the-point as well. WHY ? This is rather straightforward. Why is it important? Why does it matter whether messag......

13 of 127 | Requested Display Token For Cardspace Selector to display - Sergey Shishkin of newtelligence asked a very good question on the Microsoft Cardspace forums here. Basically, the current STS examples out there doesnt show a good sample of how a RSTR will look and be parsed on the client Cardspace selector before it is sent over to the Relying Party (RP) or website. If you click on the "Retrieve" button on the Cardspace selector, while the RST<->RSTR takes place, somehow, the Cardspace selector doesnt show the credentials that will be sent to the RP from the STS, or more commonly known as the Identifying Party (IP). The reason why was that the current STS samples out there ignores the RequestDisplayToken element value and there......

14 of 127 | geoBlog - Geographical (Location) Based Logging ? - So, while waiting for a new turn in my career to start, a couple of motivations spurred me to a 2-weekend-long project which I have completed, more or less. It is no surprise I have always been interested in all kinds of distributed technologies and I have always wanted to hack out a interesting prototype based on GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and the likes. One of the motivations I had is to log events based on the trail I have been or want to go on (on a mountain hike, on a cruise, rafting, sailing, etc). It would be nice to have a map associated with it and pinpoint the locations that we left a trail with an option to leave sticky notes on those markers. With our ......

15 of 127 | Moving on ... and swallowing the Red Pill, finally -     ... Life is really about moving on. - Oprah Winfrey Well, what else can I say ? After going through rounds of remote and local interviews conducted by the MSFT Corp product teams as well as the Microsoft subsidiaries and field offices in Asia Pacific for various opportunities and roles in the past year and going through my very own intensive decision-making process (Yes, I have my own methodologies with Spreadsheets and CheckBoxes), I have made a decision. It wasnt at all easy as some of those packages looked really really good and attractive, especially those that require me to uproot me and my family ......

16 of 127 | Have I wasted my last 3 years ? - I remembered speaking to some people during an architectural review as well as during a "Meet the Experts" Lounge in the just-recently concluded Microsoft TechED Asia 2006 in Malaysia and I made the comment where I said something to this effect: "If I had to re-live my career for the last 3 years with the hindsight of today's technologies, I would NOT have chosen to go down the server technology route with MTS, COM+, WS-*, WSE, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo), I would have chosen GUI and focus on client-side technologies with the benefit of knowing what Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) can bring ..." A lot of people asked me what......

17 of 127 | Testing dasBlog 1.9 - Testing: Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously - Indigo) (c) William Tay 2000-2006 | Solution Architect Consultant http://www.softwaremaker.net/blog...

18 of 127 | ... and Savvy Advertisers dont use (Obscure) acronyms - W T F ? I spotted this advertisement across many major lamposts outlining the major roads to the WorldBank/IMF Bankers and Governors meeting held in Singapore this month. While the entire country prepares itself to welcome about 22,000 delegates with security precautions, road closures, road re-paving and tons of marketing dollars and campaigns to showcase itself to the world such as this, I felt that the poster above is done in an amateurish way. One glance at it and I bet my last dollar the instinctive reaction is that Savvy Bankers use Intellectual Property. While I agree with the context and meaning of the messag......

19 of 127 | SOA + RIA + OSS = Web 2.0 - OMG - Spare me. Let the world move on, for goodness sake. Now, I will have to face more hype built on fluff from clients ... (c) William Tay 2000-2006 | Architect Consultant http://www.softwaremaker.net/blog...

20 of 127 | Windows Workflow: Scheduler and Threads - I dont think the world has seen so much emphasis on a feature of product even before it was pre-launched. In this context, I am talking about _WF_ and the emphasis on a non-feature, actually. Windows Workflow consists of an activity library and a framework, a runtime engine, and a runtime services components. Most of these will work out-of-the-box and some of them comes with extensibility mechanisms which you can further enhance or customize on. All of those must run within a host application process - which you have to build. In other words, Windows Workflow is just a framework with managed APIs and not a designed as a......

21 of 127 | [MS.TechED.SEA.2006] Developing Web Services: Tips and Tricks - What a great turnout and what a great rousing response I got for my 2nd Microsoft TechED South East Asia 2006 session titled: Developing Web Services: Tips and Tricks. I love the Malaysian crowd. It has shown so much technical maturity and passion over the years I have spoken there and I appreciate all of you very very very much. Thank you for all the mail you have sent me over the past few years on your generous compliments for my presentations on your Thank Yous for the topics I have taught and the issues I have raised that all of you could identify with on your appreciation for my work I put in my......

22 of 127 | Axis2/C Version 0.93 - REST Support on Http-GET and Http-POST is here - Apache Axis2/C version 0.93 is released. This should please the REST camp and highlights the momentum of how REST can be implemented in Web Services. If you are in KL next week, I will be briefly touching base on the REST-vs-SOAP style of implementing Web Services. Key Features AXIOM, an XML object model optimized for SOAP 1.1/1.2 Messages. This has complete XML infoset support. Support for one-way messaging (In-Only) and request response messaging (In-Out) Description hierarchy (configuration, service groups, services, operations and messages) Directory based ......

23 of 127 | Extra reasons for going to Microsoft TechED Asia 2006 - For the 4th year in a row, I will be speaking in Microsoft TechED 2006 Asia. This time, the event will return to its original roots back in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Unlike the previous rounds, I wont touch base on any Level 400 topics and going nitty-gritty into details of <angleBrackets/> messaging or gnarly-XSD'isms. From previous experiences, it doesnt sit too well with the asian crowd. Instead, I am going with a couple of very interesting topics. One focuses on a specific implementation of identity and service-orientation, the other is for the audience to have a better idea on what Web Services are all about first before embar......

24 of 127 | GetToken Helper for Cardspace on .NET 2.0 - Many people have asked how we can retrieve and process a token sent by a subject or a Security Token Service. Just to showcase the non-intrusiveness of _WCS_, in that we can easily incorporate a Cardspace "Sign-in with Cardspace" into your website today such as this or this, I have shown snippets of how we can do so via php here. As an another example of non-intrusiveness, I have also got a simple working sample that you can use to integrate into your ASP.NET 2.0 page today. Of course, this is a hack job and there are no try catch and the xml parsing code is hastily done. To summarize, I wont win the elegance award here  ... but yo......

25 of 127 | Using OpenSSL for Cardspace Demo on PHP - I believe some hardcore _WCS_ fanatics out there may have tried out Kim Cameron's IdentityBlog Cardspace demo on php. The tutorials can code samples can be found via his blog here. As of this time, I dont think he has updated it to work with the WinFX July CTP drop. If you had played with those php samples, you will realize that nothing much has changed for the WinFX July CTP drop, we are still using the same version of _WS-Trust_ and _WS-Security_ specifications. While WS-Security has been pretty much baked, as the advanced WS-* specifications reach a better level of maturity and acceptance, it wont change as frequent anymore. The ......

26 of 127 | Slight miss in the WinFX (.NET 3.0) July CTP WCF Samples - While running the setup scripts for the Message Security (Certificate) samples for the July CTP of WCF, I came across this screen: Upon further investigation into the setup batch scripts reveal this: for /F "delims=" %%i in ('"%MSSDK%\bin\FindPrivateKey.exe" My LocalMachine -n ... where I discovered the variable %MSSDK% was not defined in file. So add this line to the variable settings on the top of the batch script: set MSSDK=C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0 This should help solve the puzzule of the missing directory name ... (c) William Tay 2000-2006 | Solution Architect Consultant http://www.......

27 of 127 | Published: WCF Interoperability with WSE 2.0 and the Migration Incentive - Blasphemy ... It is finally published. After many, many, and I mean, many months of paying the process tax for this piece, it is finally LIVE ! I started this piece with the first ever March 2005 CTP of _WCF_ and I went through so many port demos and edit document cycles its so unbelievably painful ... But it is really good to see this in online form and shape. I started with this idea even though _MSFT_ has explicity stated that it will not support any form of interoperability between WSE 2.0 and WCF, even though it is "theoretically possible to develop Web services using WSE 2.0 in such a way that they can interoperate with WSE ......

28 of 127 | What ? No WCF 2 ? - Well, the marketing spin doctors are at it again. Besides the renaming of WinFX to .NET Framework 3.0, Infocards has gotten a new and better name as well. I am just glad that it is not renamed as Windows Card Foundation. And for good reasons ... Actually _Windows Cardspace_ does sound nice. The word "space" is just so much more abstract and encompassing ... (c) William Tay 2000-2006 | Solution Architect Consultant http://www.softwaremaker.net/blog...

29 of 127 | Webcast Experience: WS-ReliableMessaging in WCF - During my webcast on "Why we need Reliablility in SOAP: Web Services", there were a couple of hiccups which hindered a better listener experiences. I cannot see the animation on the slides I am presenting, even though I am assured by the presenter that the floor is seeing it. Therefore, I am guessing what the audience is actually seeing in my click-animation and gauging my content from there. It was neither easy nor pleasant. There was a disconnect incident in my demos that also marred the listener's experience. I had to re-login again. Not Good. Isnt it ironic? My network connection showed lack of reliab......

30 of 127 | Thumbs up for the Apache Axis2 team - Apache Axis2/C version 0.91 has been released via here: http://ws.apache.org/axis2/c/download.cgi Key Features AXIOM, an XML object model optimized for SOAP 1.1/1.2 messages with complete XML Infoset support Support for One-Way Messaging (In-Only) and Request Response Messaging (In-Out) Module architecture, mechanism to extend the SOAP processing model Context hierarchy Directory based deployment model Raw XML providers WS-Addressing, both the submission (2004/08) and final (2005/08) versions Transports: HTTP * Both simple axis server and Apache2 httpd module an......

31 of 127 | Matevz adds his weight on Workflows and Services... - Fellow _MS RD_ and well-known distributed systems expert Matevz Gacnik has a great blog to add on top of mine called: Windows Workflow Foundation: Exposing Workflows as Services. Trust me, Matevz is a lot more than Request-Response or what his blog suggested i-smile. In it, he explains some of the ways you can do so and the pitfalls to watch out for. Of course, you can get around the "workflow runtime can only get loaded once per appdomain" issues by having it static to the service implementation class OR if you want only one instance of each - _WCF_ also gives you a singleton-like instancing mode as well - InstanceContextMode:=InstanceContextMode.Si......

32 of 127 | Hooking a Workflow into your WCF Dispatcher - One of the common questions I came across my _WF_ and _WCF_ consultancy tour is how do we logically use WF inside a WCF-hosted service. I had spent some time talking about how we can host a WF in a WCF:ServiceHost and how we can create a channel to invoke a workflow inside a WCF Service. Of course, we can always bring up a Workflow runtime and create a new workflow instance within the ServiceHost. However, some of us may prefer a more non-intrusive mode of a workflow invocation style. There are actually many extensible points at the Service Dispatcher which you can hook into that is part of a service behavior. There is the ISer......

33 of 127 | Speaking in the Enterprise Architecture Conference 2006 in Singapore - I will be speaking in The Enterprise Architecture Conference 2006 to be held in Singapore on 18-19 July 2006. And no - for once, I wont be speaking on Web Services or anything Service-Oriented. Instead, I will tackle head-on a topic that not many people would not like to go near: Enterprise Architecture Security I will be speaking on the second day (19 July 2006: 1530-1630) and quite a few of my governmental clients will be there as well in the audience. The title is: Security Planning and Strategies In An Enterprise Architecture. The agenda is as follows: Outline of the key Enterprise-based security issues ......

34 of 127 | Getting Down and Dirty with WF and WCF in Kuala Lumpur - If you would like to get down and dirty with me with _WF_ and _WCF_ in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, come visit me in end April and end May where I will be spending 3 days each drilling deep into the plumbings of both WF and WCF. If you are interested in the above, speak to your Microsoft Malaysia contact. However, if you are not into deep dirty wrestling with <angleBrackets /> or <wf:Activities />, you may opt to go for something lighter here. ...

35 of 127 | Speaking in Security Symposium in Malaysia - I will be speaking in Kuala Lumpur in a security symposium organized by Microsoft Malaysia on April 4th 2006. The event details can be found here and the agenda here. I will be touching on Web Services Security: Locking down the wire - Today and Tommorow. Some of my agenda items include: What is available today to build secure web services on the Microsoft technology stack What the up-and-coming _WCF_ in Windows _Vista_ will provide in terms of Security Some prescriptive guidelines on how to move forward ... Registrations for the IT Pro track is here while the Developer track i......

36 of 127 | Use Managed Code where it makes sense - Ar - Arguments...It does make us move forward at times. Richard Grimes has managed to kick up a storm again with his article here, again. While, I would not go very far in saying a kernel Operating System should be written in managed-code. God knows I will not use one if it is and you shouldnt to. As far as I can tell, _.NET_ was not created for writing operating systems?  It sits on top of the operating system and thats that It is, however, very important to note, the investments _MSFT_ have on managed code. Instead of giving you the usual bullets and docs. How about this ? Lines of Managed Code _Visual Stu......

37 of 127 | Developers != Presenters - I remember talking to someone on the _WCF_ team before and the reason they chose [MesssageEncoding].MTOM instead of MessageTransmissionOptimizationMechanism is so that it could *at least* fit on a slide. Well, that someone obviously didnt educate the developer who build the [MessageSecurityVersion]. WSSecurity11WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10 property. [Talk about a handful] Not only is it hard to fit on a slide, it would be hard to mouth those words as well. Besides "bug jail", "secure-programming courses",  "geography lessons", I would highly recommend Microsoft engi......

38 of 127 | More alternatives to SOAP: Rest-RPC - Now if XML-RPC aint enough (I had blogged about this here and here), now we can add REST-RPC into the mix. The main difference would be the use of HTTP to provide application semantics via its verbs. This would mean that there would hardly be any XML or Request payload of any kind. ...

39 of 127 | Securing your WCF Services on TSS.NET - As mentioned here, here is the another article on TheServerSide.NET that I wrote. The security features and options mentioned in the above piece are not exhaustive. In fact, it is far from being exhaustive. I will be writing more on those other features and options, either through this blog channel or one of those sites I mentioned. Stay tuned for it. Enjoy. i-smile ...

40 of 127 | More WCF / WWF articles coming along your way. - TheServerSide.NET, which serves the Enterprise .NET Community, has picked up on a previous piece I wrote earlier here with regards to _WCF_. Expect more _WCF_ and _WWF_ articles to come from me on the TheServerSide.NET as well as MSDN online. ...

41 of 127 | XAdES Interop with XML-DSIG as implemented by the .NET Framework - What a way to start off a new category on my blog called "Interoperability". I recently came across an interesting post in the forums that goes something like this: [QUOTE] Currently I'm working with Visual Studio 2003 in order to generate xmldsig signature. I'm using the class signedxml  to create the xmldsig signature and I get somthing like this:   [Signature xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#"]     [SignedInfo]       [CanonicalizationMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xml-c14n-20010315" /] ............   [/Signature] But I need the sign......

42 of 127 | Scott, Dilbert and Web Services - ...

43 of 127 | Proposing Software Systems and (Web) Services - I recently had a chance to sit down with a client to discuss about software systems as well as to find out what we can do for them in their new system proposal. I mentioned the 80/20 rule and explained to him what is was. Then, we talked about (Web) Services and he was aghast that we could still be using (Web) Services even within his own LAN - and not connected to the WWW. "...but I thought you need to be using a browser and connected to the internet to be using (Web) Services ? ..." Sigh. I have heard that one too many times. One of the recent misnomers, no doubt. Services, Services, Services. Code and Location is irrelevant......

44 of 127 | Gripes about our local Singapore Service Providers - I am known to be a hard-driving consumer. Hey, I work hard for my money, they should do the same for mine. It is all fair and good. Recently, my phone line was bad (read: Noisy) and that affected my ADSL line as well (read: intermittent Internet Connectivity). When I called the service provider, they told me that the linesman would only come to my place after 3 days and, as usual, said: They will be there between 1300 to 1800 hours I was stunned. Where is the basic SLA ? They said that because of the rain these days, the Fault Lines Technicians and Engineers were swarmed and therefore were busy. I told them - to be honest - thats your problem; ......

45 of 127 | [Go_Live_Licenses]WCF and WWF[/Go_Live_Licenses] - Microsoft announced Go Live licenses this morning for _WCF_ and _WWF_ , which lets customers use the January Go Live releases of WCF and WWF in their deployment environments. Do note that these are unsupported Go Lives.)  More information about the Go Live program is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/getthebeta/golive/default.aspx. There are also a couple of community sites for WCF and WWF here: http://windowscommunication.net http://windowsworkflow.net The community sites give users everything they need to start using WWF and WF today.  If you have some great samples, do post them to th......

46 of 127 | More on WS-Security 1.1 with WSE 3.0 - With regards to my post here, I thought I expand on one of many enhancements that _WS-Security_ 1.1 brings. "MutualCertificate11Security" assertion is one of the few security turnkey assertions in _WSE_ 3.0 and what basically it is is that the client and server are authenticated using X.509 certificates (X509SecurityToken). Message-level security is implemented using X509SecurityToken security tokens. This turnkey security assertion requires WS-Security 1.1 Once that is configured and implemented properly, it is rather interesting to see what transcends on the wire. Here is a brief snippet: [wsse:Security soap:mustUnderstand="1"] ... [wsse:Binar......

47 of 127 | WSE 3.0 (WS-Security 1.1) Digital Signatures Enhancements - I have been back fiddling at the _WSE_ 3.0 technology space for the past few weeks and I am now grokking into the plumbings since there are quite a few forums, blogs, posts out there focusing on the higher-level abstract programming model. I am very pleased that WSE 3.0 has implemented _WS-Security_ 1.1 at its very core, so much so that it is the de-facto security standard to be used in most of the Turnkey Security Assertions that comes with the product. One of the things that I have always been asking for through my contacts and channels in the OASIS WS-Security Technical Committee is the ability to sign my document snippets with a symmetric key instead. ......

48 of 127 | Connecting Web services with the System.ServiceModel - On SearchVB.com - I was approached to write about _WCF_ a while back for SearchVB.com, a member of TechTarget.com. Between a few new transitional CTP drops and major Microsoft events, I managed to hack out a simple piece here targetted at entry WCF-VB developers. There is another intermediate one (that deals with security) which will appear slightly later on TechTarget.com. Stay tuned to this space for further updates. Do take note that this piece is currently one of the very few out there that is written against one of the latest WCF versions (The Sept-CTP WinFX drop). Enjoy and send those comments over. ...

49 of 127 | Initializing Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation - Besides being deeply involved in _WCF_, I have also been very engaged with the technologies of _WWF_ and _WPF_. I will be blogging actively on these 2 technologies as we move towards _Vista_ ...

50 of 127 | Now, THAT is a drummer - One of the posters scheduled for the WorldWide Launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006 on Nov 7 2005 at Moscone West Convention Center. The traces of what I did here is starting to show more and more as launch dates near. Now, aint that a cool drummer dude i-wink ...