Ok, seriously, I have encountered several problems on the web service APIs provided by Community Server during the process of creating this InfoPath blog client. It seems to me the forum at communityserver.org is not very active. Therefore I am posting it here in hope of getting someone's attention.

 

Some of those issues I believe are bugs, some of them might be design changes. But what I really, really do not understand is the soap header change between CS1.0 and the CS version on http://blogs.msdn.com (I believe the latter is newer, pre 1.1, maybe?). Take a look, here is the CS1.0 header:

 

  <soap:Header>
    <BlogCredentials xmlns="http://communityserver.org/blogs/services/posts/">
      <Username>string</Username>
      <Password>string</Password>
      <Blogname>string</Blogname>
    </BlogCredentials>
  </soap:Header>

and here is the msdn one:

 

  <soap:Header>
    <ServiceCredentials xmlns="http://communityserver.org/blogs/services/posts/">
      <Username>string</Username>
      <Password>string</Password>
      <SectionName>string</SectionName>
    </ServiceCredentials>
  </soap:Header>

Due to this change, the client proxy classes of both versions are totally incompatible to each other. In order to work with both, you'd go through two code paths for each web service calls. (Well, someone familiar with reflection might do better, but I doubt it). I, actually ended up creating a separate edition for each of them. What a pain…

 

Of course, there are a few other changes made in the newer versions. Most of them are meaningful and easy to accommodate. For example, the ModerateComments property of the BlogPost class is now changed to a ModerationType enumeration. The functional improvement is obvious. Now what could you get by just changing namings in a published API set, besides introducing incomptabilities?