Some of you may be oddballs like me: you like .NET, you program in .NET, but you don't always use Visual Studio. You hand-code everything for some applications. You often open up a text editor and just start writing a source module, with no wizards, no project templates, etc. You hand-code your MSbuild...

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...

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...

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!

I wanted to point something out regarding the WSDL-First item I posted yesterday . This is a look at the interface generated by the SvcUtil.exe tool for WCF. [System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute( "System.ServiceModel" , "3.0.0.0" )] [System.ServiceModel.ServiceContractAttribute...

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...

I am constantly developing new WCF services to try out various techniques, ideas, scenarios. Many times for these quickie WCF applications I will just use a text editor to write the code. As you know there are multiple options for hosting your WCF services . For these quick apps, I will typically...

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...

Dare had an en-pointe analysis of the emergence of various new non-standarcd communications protocols, such as Facebook Thrift and Google Protocol buffers , and how they compare to the standards-based comms protocols like RSS, ATOM or even WS-*. Dare correctly points out that these tools can be useful...

A New Blog started last week, aggregating WCF and WF topics. If you're like me you have really good intentions about reading blogs, you have your subscriptions all organized, you download the content through outlook daily... but then when it comes down to it, it's hard to keep up with reading them all...

My buddy Justin wrote about how to set the Content-Type headers in a WebGet method in a WCF REST app. Doing this would allow each WebGet method to specify its own Content-Type at runtime. After I summarized how to build a WCF REST app in a post a couple weeks ago, Kyle Beyer asked if there was a...

Chuck, in a comment on a previous post , posed this question: Why choose WCF for a REST app? Here it is in full context: I'm having a hard time justifying why I would use WCF for REST. It seems dead simple in ASP.NET (or any other web framework), yet obscure in WCF. There are two big problems I...

Hah! followup on a hot topic. I posted earlier on content-type negotiation in REST with WCF. My buddy Vittorio wrote about MySpace's kiss-and-tell episode at Mix08. MySpace has exposed a REST interface for the MySpace resources - see http://developer.myspace.com for more info - and the designers talked...

Just had a comment-exchange on my prior post on How to build a REST app in WCF . I thought I would reproduce and elaborate on it a bit here, in a post. Kyle Beyer asked how to make WCF honor a content-type header (Accept header) in the request, and then modify the result of the REST request based...

The WCF samples published by Microsoft were updated in early March 2008. Download the samples here .

Get the update here .

Stefan Tilkov has written an article addressing doubts about REST, it's posted on InfoQ . He delivers a top-10 list of weaknesses of REST, and then proceeds to address each one. These are things like, lack of tools support, lack of a formal contract language (WADL isn't real (not yet anyway)), it...

Check it out. The prior version had a bunch of things that were unclear, inaccurate, incomplete, or just plain goofy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Communication_Foundation If you no likey, let me know or, better, update it yourself! Just make sure you get it right!

Earlier this month, Syscon published an article that describes how to interconnect .NET and Java apps via a web services programming model, but using JMS as part of the connectivity infrastructure. I just saw it today. The solution relies on ActiveMQ . The key capability of ActiveMQ that makes this...

My prior post talked about how NOT to write a REST app in .NET. I mentioned WCF as the preferred option. In this post, I'll describe the steps for how you should do it. Some background First up, you should use WCF to build your REST app. WCF is the Windows Communication Foundation . ( Microsoft...

This post by Jack Altiere describes how to build a REST API in .NET. This spurred a respose... Firstly, I think really he is talking about a REST interface, not an API. REST is all about the interface. Maybe I am splitting hairs here, but I think it is important to be careful about terminology. ...