Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 4

Today wraps up the series on detailed messaging changes in Orcas. You can get the whole series here as well as the previous high-level overview of new Orcas features I did.

• Messaging Additions in Orcas
• Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 2
• Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 3

Now, let's go on with the list. I've got one last feature to cover and then some of the more notable bug fixes that were reported by customers. If you need one of the bug fixes, you can get them by either installing Orcas or the .NET framework 3.0 service pack.

• Enhancements for web programming. RSS and ATOM syndication, partial trust, JSON, AJAX, and HTTP application programming are all covered reasonably well in the high-level overview so I didn't break them out this time.
• We no longer make shutdown slow. It took a somewhat rare machine configuration but the various services we run for port sharing and activation could prevent the machine from shutting down until they timed out.
• Copying a POX message. There aren't any standard channels that buffer messages and are used with HTTP under MessageVersion.None. However, if you write a message inspector, then you need to copy the message before reading it and that now works.
• Starting a listener while hosted in IIS. I don't recommend starting an independent web service from inside of a web service hosted in IIS. We've made the threading work in this service-within-service case but you're still at the mercy of IIS deciding when to deactivate the outermost service.
• Emptier messages. When doing POX we have to surface messages even when the HTTP payload is empty so that you have an object to get your HTTP message properties from. Until now though, when we did that conversion those messages would stop reporting that they were empty.

Next time: Private Data Members