Last week at the PDC 2008, Microsoft released the public beta of “Geneva”. “Geneva” is three things: Geneva Server. This is a security token service (STS), as defined in the OASIS WS-Trust specification. This thing issues and transforms claims, manages user access, and enables automated federation...

FYI: The MS JDBC Driver is completely tested by IBM for use with WebSphere App Server v6.1 and v7.0. From the IBM Announcement for WebSphere Application Server v7.0 : WebSphere Application Server V7.0 does not include the WebSphere Connect JDBC driver that had been provided in WebSphere Application Server...

Damian Mehers made a comment on my blog post from April , but I felt it was worth a full reblog. Damian's used the same WCF extensibility points I used to produce some boilerplate that varies the response content type from JSON to XML, based on the Accept or Content-Type header of the GET request...

The REST starter kit that we launched at PDC is now live! :: http://www.msdn.com/wcf/rest . The WCF REST Starter Kit is a set of features, Visual Studio templates, samples and guidance that help people build REST apps using WCF. WCF, part of the .NET Framework, got some enhancements for REST support...

Microsoft joins AMQP It's very good to see this. For those that don't know, AMQP is the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol , a nascent middleware standard that describes an interoperable protocol for application messaging systems. Driven primarily by companies, and not by vendors, AMQP aims to introduce...

I have previously written about IIRF . Here I go again: IIRF has now has been updated to v1.2.15. IIRF is Ionic's Isapi Rewrite Filter . It is a small, cheap, easy to use, URL rewriting ISAPI filter that combines a good price (free!) with good features. It is fast and powerful. It works on IIS 5.0...

The v1.6 release of DotNetZip is now available. DotNetZip is the open source Zip Library for .NET, available at http://www.codeplex.com/DotNetZip . Major new features: Unicode support, as well as support for arbitrary code pages. Now you can build zip files that have names with Unicode characters...

There is now an Eclipse project, Eclipse4SL , to produce tools that work with Microsoft Silverlight . See Neil Hutson's blog post for some details. For those of you who have day jobs and find it hard to keep up with all the code-names and product names coming out of Microsoft, Silverlight is the...

This came out last month, I just learned about it from an email from Jesus today. WebLogic Server 10gR3 now has an officially-supported .NET client for its JMS provider . Very cool. Some of you might be wondering, just what does that mean? It means there is a queue mechanism in the WebLogic Server...

Jesus and my collegue Kent Brown both spoke at Oracle Open World recently, on interop between WCF and WebLogic. http://weblogs.asp.net/gsusx/archive/2008/09/19/speaking-at-oracle-open-world.aspx But I found out after the fact! nice!

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that you could do WSDL-First development with WCF, but I didn't go into detail as to how that would work. Somebody asked, so I guess I'll describe the specific steps. I want to use a real scenario, so for a WSDL, I will use the WSDL that Microsoft defines for Microsoft...

Yesterday I mentioned using a custom service host to flatten the WSDL that is generated by a WCF service. This is something Christian showed us all how to do a long while ago, to improve interoperability between WCF-implemented services and consumers written on other technology stacks. Flattening WSDL...

DotNetZip is an open-source library to allow any .NET application to read and create zip files. If you want your ASP.NET page to grab an uploaded zipfile and unpack it on the server, DotNetZip can help you. If you want to generate a zipfile from a server-based app like an ASP.NET page and send it as...

When LINQ shipped, it included a provider model, to encourage people to make other systems and data stores accessible from the coolness-that-is-LINQ. Back in February, Charlie Calvert published a long list of LINQ providers . In July, Robert Shelton later reblogged it . Charlie also has a list of...

Couple of helpful posts from the archives for you. If you are care about interop, then you probably want to use a contract-first or WSDL-first design for your web services. In other words, you will not simply decorate server-side code annotations (in Java) or attributes (in .NET) and generate WSDL...

I was just browsing the WCF forum on MSDN. Here's a summary of the recent interesting threads dealing with interop: How to map complex data types exposed by a J2EE web services, into a WCF client? How to use connect from an AXIS 2 client to a WCF service using SSL? How to transfer a Hashtable...

There's a new screencast series on building services using the WCF part of .NET. The first few are already available. The first one is the basic "Hello World" example, the next couple cover REST: How to build a WCF Service using Visual Studio 2008, and .NET 3.5. (10 minutes) Creating a HI...

Luis Diego Fallas provides some hints. He uses a RELAX NG based parser called nXML mode for emacs. http://langexplr.blogspot.com/2008/08/using-emacs-and-nxml-to-edit-xaml-files.html

Tim Bray at Sun has some questions and comments on REST . First, let me say that the religious wars over WS-* and REST seem to be generated by a very small number of people who have a very large amount of spare time. Don't these people have things to do ? Can it possibly be enlightening or helpful...

Steve Sfartz offers a tip for configuring the Tomcat connector on IIS, to allow IIS and Tomcat to run from the same domain. This will allow numerous interop scenarios, one of which is to allow IIS to serve Silverlight apps while the Tomcat engine can serve JSP and Servlets.

You saw the big news: Microsoft announced that it will give $100k to the Apache Software Foundation . What are the implications of this move? I don't know exactly, but I smell opportunity! I feel very pleased with this step. Of course, it is only a start, and we will have to see how it goes. But...

Ha! It happened, just not in the way I thought it might . In February, I wrote that Microsoft, if it's bid to acquire Yahoo were successful, would become a Platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. Last week, MS took a much cheaper route, and just gave $100,000 directly to Apache . ...

https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx "Oslo": Managing Software + Services Applications Presenter: Oliver Sharp Increasingly, applications will consist of services that run both on-premises and in the cloud. Learn how Microsoft is simplifying the deployment...

I came across this old bit of news - In May, Cisco joined the ranks of vendors that want to introduce a house-brand protocol and description in lieu of the standard ones already available in things like REST, SOAP, and WSDL. Going by the name of Etch, this new thing from Cisco is supposed to solve the...

I have come to a conclusion: I no longer want to deal with the hassle that has become Apache AXIS. Back in the day, when interconnecting Java to .NET was still novel, I started using Apache SOAP to show how interop between .NET and JAva was possible. I was looking for something simple and easy, something...