Christian Weyer's Blog

OK, he is British...: Richard Blewett joins thinktecture

Agreed: there has never been a really good relationship - let's not even start talking about friendship - between Germans and Brits.
Let's forget about this for a while... working together with an industry luminary like Richard Blewett is more than I could ever wish.

Luckily enough, Richard joined thinktecture this week as a high-class consultant - welcome!
Working with Rich (subscribe to his blog here) is surely going to be a lot of fun.

From DynWsLib to... ProxyFactory

OK, there is one library I wrote a long time ago which has a lot of fans: DynWsLib.
This library is for invoking your Web Services dynamically without having to generate a client-side proxy class at design/compile time with WSCF, wsdl.exe or Visual Studio. No need to know the exact Web Service description and endpoint at compile/design time. Just get your WSDL, specify the service (binding) to use and the operations to call, and voila! The library can be especially useful in testing scenarios.

Now, I have not been working on the lib for a long time (just released a .NET 2.0 compatible version some time ago).
Recently, two great guys, Pascal and Anthony, took the next step and built upon DynWsLib what they call the ProxyFactory. Go and grab it!

The emergence of the WCF platform announces the unification of all communications technologies provided by the .NET platform in a common foundation and so their decline, WCF’s adoption curve will be slow enterprise wide. So it is still safe bet to develop a library to leverage .NET 2.0 generics and SchemaImporterExtension mechanisms to offer a similar developer experience.

Such a library already exists to target web services communication, it was developed by Christian Weyer but as opposed to the WCF ChannelFactory<TChannel>, his library doesn’t provide an effective mechanism to handle specific types during the proxy generation process. This is what is tackled by the ProxyFactory project in taking advantage of SchemaImporterExtension mechanisms. Futhermore, alternative communication techonologies are targetted such as Remoting and WSE.

Commenting problems

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Old news, but extremely helpful: spicing up WSE 2.0

Buddy Kirk has released some very cool VS.NET project templates for WSE 2.0. If you are doing Web Services programming with WSE, go and grab them!

This installation provides item templates for WSE 2.0 SoapClient, SoapService, and SoapReceiver classes.  Adding an item to a project automatically adds references to microsoft.web.services2.dll, system.xml.dll, and system.web.services.dll 

Soap-over-TCP interop with WSE & Apache Axis

Nice snippet from Simon about how you may achieve interoperability between Apache Axis and WSE 2.0's soap.tcp-based messaging model. Of course totally unsupported - very interesting and good stuff to learn.

WS-RM4WSE2

Nice, Andres. WS-ReliableMessaging glue for WSE 2.0.

WSE3 - what do *you* want?

Aaron asks to comment on his WSE 3 wish list. Go!

Look ma, it actually *is* a product!

I have been asked by a lot of people. And customers asked why to use WSE 2.0.
Well, besides the technical aspects, I told them: "Because it is a product. A product from Microsoft with *full* support, not just a technology sample.". And pointed them to this page.

*Must have* resource on Web services interop

MSDN, finally an official place for Web services interop on MSDN. Do not miss the overall great Web Services Interoperability Guidance (WSIG)!
Current installments:

IBM WebSphere Application Developer 5.1.2
Simon Guest shares recommendations for Web Services interoperability between the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and IBM WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD) 5.1.2.  

BEA WebLogic 8.1 SP3 (8.1.3)
Based on a series of unit tests between Microsoft .NET and BEA WebLogic 8.1.3, this article shows a series of scenarios and recommendations for achieving Web Services Interoperability between the two.  

WS-Security Interoperability Using WSE 2.0 and Sun JWSDP 1.4
This article shows WS-Security Interoperability between Microsoft WSE 2.0 and Sun JWSDP 1.4. The walkthroughs in this article will take you through all you need to know to configure the two environments for securely signing and encrypting SOAP requests and responses using X509 certificates.  

Mr. Simon Guest did it. Again.

Beispiele für den WebCast "Connected Systems - Implementierungsstrategien: ASMX und WSE"

Wie versprochen stellen Dariusz und ich hier die gezeigten Beispiele aus dem WebCast vom Montag, den 6. September 2004 zur Verfügung. Wer den Live WebCast verpasst hat, kann ihn sich (und freilich alle anderen auch) über die deutsche MSDN-Seite herunter laden - so ca. in eins bis zwei Wochen.

Der Download besteht aus drei Beispielanwendungen zum Thema ASMX und WSE 2.0:

• Im ersten Sample zeigen wir den Schritt weg vom klassischen Hello World Web Service, hin zu einem mehr nachrichtenorientierten Denken bei Web services mit ASMX (ASP.NET Web services). Es wird gezeigt wie man die interne .NET-Implementierung weitestgehend entkoppeln kann vom aussen sichtbaren Interface und Message Contract des Web services - per Code -> Code-basiertes Contract First.
• Die zweite Demo besteht aus einem Web-Projekt und einer Windows Forms-Applikation. Im initial leeren Web-Projekt soll ein ASMX Web service gehostet werden. Ziel ist es, beide Anwendungen völlig unabhängig voneinander zu entwickeln - das einzige was beide wissen müssen ist, wie der Contract in Form eines WSDL ausssieht.
  Dieses WSDL wurde vorher mit einem externen WSDL Editor von CapeClear entworfen, basierend auf einem Schema welches in Form eines XSDs im Visual Studio .NET 2003 erstellt wurde. Ausgehend von diesen XML-Metadaten wird dann mittels des WsContractFirst Tools .NET Code für beide Anwendungen erzeugt. -> Schema-basiertes Contract First.
• Das letzte Beispiel dient der Verdeutlichung von "echten" Einwegnachrichten basierend auf SOAP. Mit WSE 2.0 lässt sich auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen (SoapSender/SoapReceiver oder SoapClient/SoapService) SOAP Messaging par excellence implementieren. Die beiden Windows Forms-Anwendungen zeigen dies anhand von SoapSender und SoapReceiver.

Für Fragen können Sie gerne Kontakt mit mir aufnehmen. Danke.