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15.02.05

Basta! 2005 SOA and Web Services with VS.NET 2005

I spend some hours listening to session by Christian Weyer. Christian talked about SOA, Software Factories & DSLs (in the context of modeling web services), and web service development with .NET Framework 2.0.

He mentioned the 4 (Microsoft) tenets and gave some general advice for distributed systems based on a SOA. His evaluation of the state of web service technologies today was, well, less than sobering. The general tenor was that after more than 5 years web services have reached at a common understanding of the transport level (mostly reduced to SOAP over Http), and the vocabulary (XML including SOAP & WSDL). The ever evolving WS-Standards which provide required means of implementing enterprise application based on web services hinder vendors developing final implementations. But he gave us a ray of hope, too, Indigo. At least the Microsoft community will in some (or some more) months be able to develop enterprise web services ;-). Well I’m very impressed by Indigo’s programming model and its features. But the core problem won’t be solved, though …

Concerning modeling of web services he presented the “Whitehorse” tools of Visual Studio .NET 2005 Team System. I skip this part, because I’ll comment on Scott Guthries evening key note which was targeted at this topic in another entry to come. The gist of Christian’s talk is compatible with Scott’s.

Finally he talked about ASP.NET 2.0 Web Service features:

ASP.NET 2.0 allows for configuring the workings of the XMLSerializer by implementing the now official IXMLSerializable interface in combination with the XMLSchemaProvider attribute.

Developers may influence the generation of proxy classes, too. SchemaImporterExtensions provide the necessary means of doing so. Extensions are configured in the application or machine confihuration.

The network API offers means of controlling and monitoring network state. Developers can check if the network is available which is of some worth when dealing with web services. Applications are notified of changes in the network state and automatic proxy detection is possible.

No real contract first development, but code based contract first at least. The WSDL.EXE tool supports the generation of interfaces instead of abstract classes for server stubs with the /serverInterface switch.

Christian’s talk was a lot of fun. Next time his demo will work, I’m sure ;-). I agree with his views concerning the state of web services and his opinions in general. Thanks for these two great sessions!

Posted by Hartmut Wilms at 15.02.05 21:36

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