Sam Gentile's Weblog

	Saturday, August 03, 2002

Transactions and Web Services. Clemens Vasters has a well thought out and well reasoned answer to the common question: "Why doesn't SOAP have transactions?" Required reading. :) When people ask me this question, I'm going to stop answering it, and point them to this essay instead.[The .NET Guy]

2:57:41 PM

Validating XML SOAP request and response documents against XSD schemas leads to greater Web service security with only a modest effect on client performance. Microsoft's Xsd.exe is a versatile tool for generating XML schema from sample XML files. Apply this article's Heimlich maneuvers when Xsd.exe chokes on large, complex XML SOAP response documents.

10:02:29 AM

Here is a short article on Perl.NET.
10:00:55 AM

Tiberius OsBurn is at again with one of his great rants/informative article: "Tired of dinking with SOAP tags? Is your WSDL running down your leg? Tired of claims of interoperability but zero vendor support? Me too. I've been able to create a servlet in Java, have it query a database, and format the ResultSet into an XML document. I've also created a Microsoft C# class the uses the XMLTextReader class to query the Java servlet's URL, snag out the XML..."
9:59:25 AM

Ugo Cei: "Yeah, and why not also ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer, like someone said a long time ago? Listen, Scotty, I don't want your oneness, I want freedom of choice."
9:48:43 AM

With today's music consisting of rap-crap (and all the hate) and 12 year old boy and girl bands, whats a thinking man to do? There was a time once when music was challenging, when musicians could actually play their instruments, could shift rythams and structures at will. I knew right off when I was young that this was real music. With the current horrible state of music today and feeling the need to actually be musically challenged, I have gone back to this music: Yes, early Peter Gabriel led Genesis and King Crimson. I have been listening to a lot of Yes recently. Tonight, I got so see the original line-up and they were fantastic. Read more here.

2:04:11 AM

	Thursday, August 01, 2002

There are very few people in the world I would entrust the writing of a real VS.NET book to. Chris Sells is one of them. His work with GenX produced one of the most useful VS.NET add-ins and productivity tools ever made. His articles on various areas of VS.NET show a mastery of the subject: Visual Studio for Applications Provides Customized Scripting Facilities for Your .NET Project, Adding Custom Project Item Templates to VS.NET, Generative Programming: Modern Techniques to Automate Repetitive Programming Tasks, Visual Studio .NET: Managed Extensions Bring .NET CLR Support to C++. For those who work in Visual Studio.NET daily and particlarly those of us who work in the areas of extending the environment beyound documented boundaries, or to add new functionality, our picks in books are the nil pointer. The market is full of books that add nothing. They show screen shots of pulling down the New Project menu and little more. I am very happy to see Chris working on a real VS.NET book,a definitive one. I am also exteremly encouraged to see Microsoft granting Chris to allow some discussion of my particular favorite (sometimes not so favorite) area: VSIP in which I spent most of my working hours. The content looks great and I am extremly excited by this book in the works.

2:12:02 PM

	Wednesday, July 31, 2002

I ran across this article on Best Practices for Using ADO.NET.
8:53:46 AM

Paresh shares some VS.NET and Visual Studio gems. I should add some or you could add mine. I have them in a Groove space.
8:46:45 AM

Ingo: Birthday! I'm turning 23 today. I guess I'm one of the younger folks around here ;-)

Happy Birthday! Yes, you're a young pup-) And OK on the email. I guess I should try to go to WinDev too and hook up with all you guys. The lineup looks excellent. The problem is money. Well, there's always winning the lottery-). But I will be at the Web Services DevCon which as Sam Ruby suggested you shoukd come out a few days early for.

8:20:44 AM

	Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Happy Birthday!. Yep, it's my birthday. The big two-seven. Only three more years left to reach my "before thirty" goals. [System.Error.Emit]

Happy Birthday Brian, you youngster-)

9:25:27 PM

XML Schema derivation by extension superfluous?. Don falls for derivation by restriction one more time. [Don Box's Spoutlet]
9:23:47 PM

My talk at the MSR Faculty Summit. Don crawls out of his cave and sees daylight. [Don Box's Spoutlet]
9:23:27 PM

Some beta chapters from Shared Source CLI Essentials by David Stutz, Geoff Shilling, and Ted Neward. On a related note, here's a nice picture of David. [Brian Jepson's Radio Weblog]
9:22:26 PM

CLI Specs Online. The Rotor sources and ECMA specs for C# and the CLI are now available in HTML form, courtesy of Antonio Cisternino and the University of Pisa. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]
9:21:04 PM

Ingo's conference schedule this fall .... This fall's going to be fun ...

I'll be at WIN-DEV's Fall Developer Summit in Tyngsboro, MA. October 15 - 18, 2002 where I'll talk on the CLR/.NET Internals track. [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric] which is about 4 miles from my house Ingo!! We've got to meet physically-))

9:20:27 PM

Developer Jedi Masters Write....

Joe points to two brilliant looking books:

Test Driven Development (Kent Beck) is a book devoted to the black art of unit-testing. Remember in Return of the Jedi when Yoda was rambling on about how to be an effective Jedi and then in Attack of the Clones you actually see him strut his stuff - and he kicks ass... well Kent kicks ass.

and

Enterprise Application Architecture (Martin Fowler) is his long awaited book that's been evolving on his website for over a year. This book looks at design and architectural patterns of enterprise systems and discusses many practical implementations that can be built ranging from the quick and simple to very clever and scalable.

[rebelutionary]

Cool, Kent does kick ass and Martin is one of my favorite tech guys.

9:15:31 PM

Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) Validator is a small application written using .NET Framework, which sniffs DIME over HTTP messages and validates them against the DIME specification

, writing errors into the local log file. The DIME Validator�s purpose is to facilitate development of the interoperable DIME implementations by testing their conformance to the DIME specification.
8:23:56 AM

In ASP.NET, the IHttpModule interface provides notification of server requests, and lets you easily reroute them based on criteria other than browser type or version. Here the author demonstrates the use of IHttpModule for interception and explains the use of ISAPI filters for anyone who isn't yet using ASP.NET.

1:22:16 AM

George Shepherd takes a look at what it takes to write ASP code-behind pages using Managed C++.

1:20:19 AM

The collection classes in the .NET Framework Class Library demonstrate a new technique of providing thread safety, in which synchronization is provided just-in-time via a wrapper class that applies synchronization locks before processing function calls. In this article, the author presents a Visual Studio .NET add-in that generates the required code to implement this thread-safety pattern in C# classes, along with a discussion of the quality of the Visual Studio .NET automation model.

1:18:50 AM

Lots of response to Sam�s latest essay : Expect More [Simon Fell]
1:07:11 AM

A consortium of 220 companies is releasing a third version of the UDDI specification and submitting it to a standards body known as OASIS.

1:05:37 AM

This excellent article from IBM's developerWorks looks into possible shortcoming of Web Services and recommends how these potential problems can be overcome. The shortcomings focus on security/privacy, messaging/routing, quality-of-service/reliability, transaction processing, management performance, and interoperability while pointing to numerous benefits of Web Services.

1:04:12 AM

Martin Heller has an excellent article on using P/Invoke's DllImport facility. A must read!
1:02:05 AM

In this article, the author explains how to deploy an ASP.NET Web project using the Web application setup template.

12:58:53 AM

DevPower Solutions have updated their Encryption .NET component to include support for full strength DES, RC2 and TripleDES algorithms. The component lets you use the power of the .NET cryptography API while at the same time hiding the complexities. VB.Net and C# Windows Forms examples are included and the source code is available to buy.

12:58:01 AM

The tool generates layers of C# code based on a SQL Server Database including Stored Procedures, Data Access Layer, Business Rules Layer and Strongly Typed DataSets.

12:55:51 AM

	Monday, July 29, 2002

Windows XP Rockets to Sales of $46 Million [Windows Informant]
9:10:29 PM

Today, the Groovers took me out to eat for my contributions to the COM Interop RCWs delivered in Groove 2.0 and the Groove Toolkit for VS.NET to be delivered in 2.1. The highlight was being presented with a shirt signed by a lot of teammates (John Burkhardt, Paresh Suthar, Jack Ozzie) but one signature in particular made my day: Ray Ozzie, who is a personal hero of mine. Thanks Ray!
9:09:14 PM

Remoting with Rotor. I'll kick off with the demos and slides from my "Remoting with Rotor" talk at the Rotor Workshop. The talk was about the extensibility points in .NET remoting, and how they create a wonderfully powerful & flexible toolset for people doing web services research. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]
8:59:10 PM

Someone has finally written a decent article on Cutomizing Visual Studio .NET with Wizards. The difference between the article and others like this one on add-ins is that Chandu talks about the vital interface IDTWizard and VSZ and VSDIR files. .VSZ and .VSDIR files are poorly documented even in VSIP and yet are the key to understanding how to integrate with VS.NET. In my work with VS.NET, I found that a true understanding of VS.NET not only heavily involves things like VSZ and VSDIR files, but the Registry. The stunning thing about understanding VSIP and all VS.NET automation for that matter is that it is data driven from the Registry out, now from the top down. Things happen because of settings in the Registry that are used by the environment and do not proceed in a top down or object manner. VSIP has a huge learning curve and I can't talk about it here but the trying to make sense of it and VS.NET finally came when I dropped trying to understand the 300+ classes in an object kind of way and dug into the Registry and realized that it was data driven out from there. More on this later.

8:56:19 AM