simon.says

Last week, I made the switch from Office 2003 to Office 2007 Beta 2. Prior to the upgrade I was organizing my “stuff to do” using David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology and using the NetCentrics GTD Add In for Outlook. Unfortunately, as I...

I'm a big fan of using Virtual PC for both developing and prototyping new software - enabling me to try new and untested stuff, while leaving my main laptop intact for Email and Office. While Virtual PC isn't a match for the raw power of a separate development...

I thought it might be fun to put together a "Top Ten Tips for Web Services Interoperability" - especially between .NET and IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and some of the open source toolkits. I'd love to add other people's experiences, findings and comments...

In my JavaOne session yesterday I showed (what I believe to be) the first MTOM Interop demo between .NET and Java using publicly available toolkits. For those that don't know MTOM (Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) is the new specification...

I'm a big fan of using multple Microsoft Virtual PC images, especially for demos and development. My current machine has a second hard disk that is dedicated to images that I use for such work. One of the problems I've run into in the past is getting...

I’ve sat through many architect events over the past few years and one thing that always strikes me is how different one self claimed “architect” attendee can be from another. For example, I saw two architects sitting together at a recent event – one...

Today sees the launch of a new home on MSDN for Web Services Interoperability and Integration. This site includes features and articles and recommendations for acheiving interoperability and integration using Web Services. The site launches with three...

One Web services interoperability issue that I have been investigating recently has to do with using null DateTime values between .NET and Java. Here's the problem: System.DateTime in the CLR is considered a value type, where as the equivalent in Java...

For those that haven't heard, I became a father on Monday 20th September. Everything is going well, and I'm looking forward to spending the next few weeks getting to know my son. Although I may not be blogging as often during this time, I am hoping to...

I have a Toshiba Tecra M4 with 2Gb of RAM. I've had the machine for a while now and every so often, when I went to hibernate I would see a message saying "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API" (and the machine would only go into standby...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been searching for tools to display trace output for WSE 2.0. Many tools available today seem to be too expensive, over engineered, complex to install or don’t offer the features I want. My criteria for the perfect trace...

SOAP over UDP specification has been posted on MSDN. I'm a keen proponent of Web Services over other transports other than HTTP, so I'm excited to see this area develop further! For those that wish to explore further, HerveyW created a custom WSE 2.0...

I've been playing around with the "photo montage" effect in Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer . This effect lets you stitch together multiple photos to form one image - all done automatically. Here's an image I created with 9 separate photos from...

Wow, if I had a dollar for every time I was asked this question...! A high number of posts on this subject have been circulating recently. I wanted to spend a couple of minutes to first define what JMS really is, and summarize the Interop options that...

I’ve been doing a ton of work recently around user experience (UX) – and the importance of UX for architects. One thing that has become apparent is context for user interfaces – often the prettiest, most glamorous user experience does not lead to the...

Interoperability between Microsoft WSE 2.0 and Apache Axis 1.2 RC2 using a SOAP TCP Channel Summary: This article shows how to extend the usage of the SOAP TCP channel, a sample custom transport supplied with Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE)...

The following is a list of my published webcasts: Web Services Interoperability between Microsoft .NET Client and IBM WebSphere Application Developer 5.1.2 Web Service View this on-demand Web Cast to see how Web Services, and an XSD...

I have now uploaded a new version of WseTrace to a GotDotNet workspace. For those that haven't seen the previous version, WseTrace is a small utility to graphically display and manage the trace files created by WSE 2.0. It is designed to be: - Easy to...

You may know that Microsoft WSE 2.0 has the ability to use other transports other than HTTP for Web Services. Supplied "in the box" are implementations of soap.tcp and soap.inproc. When speaking at recent events I've had a few people approach me and ask...

Ram is back from vacation has been blogging on the subject of SOA and OO . While I agree with option C in Ram’s post, some of his comments took me back to the PDC talk where Don was explaining the difference between a service and an object...

My New Year's resolution for 2005 was to get a new phone. I've been pondering over this for a while, and putting aside the jealousy of my friend's phones in Europe and Asia, I took the plunge with a new purchase. My requirements for a new phone were:...

Update: This post has moved to here . My team has been spending a fair amount of time recently asking this question "What is it that you need to know to be an IT Architect?". What you should be reading? What skills should you be honing? Who should...

I was asked the question "How can you tell if a Web Service really is a Web Service?". If someone says that they have a Web Service (or more importantly is trying to sell you one!) what are the questions you should ask? I decided to put together this...

I've been having some issues with WMI on my laptop over the past couple of weeks (the symptoms of which have been strange WMI repository messages, inability to run WMIC or scripts, machine running slower than usual etc.). I didn't really want to have...

Here's are three articles that talk about developing and using Web Services for "pre-.NET" applications (e.g. a VB6 app or MFC COM control). Thanks to Brian Combs from PSS for forwarding to me: 1. Integrating Web Services and COM Components using the...