Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog

How do I measure how busy a service is and how much work is queued up for later processing? There's no single place where you can go to see all of the work items being processed by a service or a distributed system. For example, work may be queued...

Earlier this week the W3C HTML working group published a list of design principles for working on HTML 5 . HTML isn't strictly relevant for a web services programmer but I figured that there was sufficient overlap that many people would find this work...

How do I supply additional security tokens beyond those needed to sign and encrypt the message? How do I use those tokens on the service? The additional security tokens are configured through the binding. The client binding needs to be configured...

One of the least pleasant chores of getting Orcas everywhere has been cleaning out the old versions of software. If you've just been trying out the framework in the past, then it's not too bad. I've been using Visual Studio 2008 betas everywhere in addition...

What does adding an identity to a service endpoint do in configuration? When I tried it, nothing happened. The questioner is asking about supplying an endpoint identity in the configuration of a service. Here's the configuration element we're talking...

The documentation for behavior, binding element, and binding extensions in configuration says that using strong names to register types is recommended. Each time I build, the assembly version gets incremented, which changes the strong name. How can I...

The official release of the .NET Framework 3.5 took place Monday morning. As part of the download you get the new versions of WCF and WF, LINQ, and other additions to the framework as well. You'll also get the first service packs for the 2.0 and 3.0 framework...

How does a DataContract type get initialized on the server? When I change the constructor for the type, nothing happens. Older serializers relied on calling the parameter-less constructor to initialize the type when deserializing data. Data contract...

Here are a couple of quick news items that weren't long enough to get a post of their own. Orcas: Earlier this month Somasegar announced that the final release will be out before the end of November . Within a few weeks of the release I'll try to...

Message replay is an attack where a message is presented to a processor more than once in the hopes of fooling the processor into taking some action. One protection against message replay and other timing-based attacks is to have the sender timestamp...

After six weeks of comments and editing the primer on WS-Policy 1.5 that I mentioned earlier has been published by the working group. The primer is an explanation of how to use policy with web services along with best practice guidelines for policy authors...

Exciting developments in the world of network traffic capture and protocol analysis. Microsoft Network Monitor has a new companion program that lets you take network captures without having to install any software ahead of time. It even runs off of a...

Obviously WSDL and XSD are two entirely different description languages, but I was looking at the outputs of the old wsdl.exe and xsd.exe programs recently to see how they differed. They turned out to generate data type classes that were pretty much the...

MIX 2008 is returning to Las Vegas during March 5th through 7th of next year. Although it seems ridiculously early to be talking about registration four months ahead of time, past experience has shown that the MIX events can sell out well in advance....

How do I set the user principal name that the client will use when calling the service? The user principal name can be set through either code or configuration, and it's considered a part of the endpoint address used by the client. That means that...

Rather than talking about the solution to one specific question, today's article is about asking good questions. I see a lot of requests for help that only talk about what happened in the end. The last thing that went wrong probably isn't the source of...

Two new drafts came out of the Basic Profile working group last week. For those not familiar with Basic Profile, it's a subset of some of the core web service specifications along with guidelines for using those specifications in an interoperable fashion...

What are the best practices for building retry logic around network transport failures? Let's define some terms first so that we have a common language for communication. I'll say that "retry logic" is any automatically applied compensation activity...

How can I find out whether my service is running in ASP.NET compatibility mode? Why do you need to detect at runtime whether you're running in compatibility mode? As I've said before, compatibility mode is something that the odd and rare service...

I have a one-way operation that processes requests and can sometimes fail. When the operation fails, the client receives a fault notification. How can I make the operation ignore the bad requests and not send back a fault notification? This question...