Hoop Somuah : Microsoft

Making svcutil.exe and VisualBasic.Net play nice

hoop — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 05:18:00 GMT

Ali Pasha has an interesting post about some issues you can run into when you use Visual Basic and svcutil.exe and I thought I'd write a post to shed some more light on the issue.

DataContract types are uniquely identified using a namespace qualified name (namespace uri and a name). This namespace uri is used as the targetNamespace in XSD schemas created for that DataContract.

If a namespace uri is not specified when a DataContract is created, one is automatically created based on the CLR namespace of the type and using the prefix "http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/". (If you do not place your types in a CLR namespace then just the prefix is used).

To keep generated code as clean as possible, the client code generator doesn't generate an explicit namespace declaration if it doesn't have to. The problem with this approach is that VB.NET projects can affect the namespace of types using a root namespace. In the abscence of an explicit namespace uri declaration, changing a types namespace will also change it's schema which will affect it's wire representation.

As Ali pointed out, using the /namespace option with svcutil will fix the issue because the types namespace no longer maps directly to the auto-generated namespace and the code generator will have to explicitly define the namespace uri. Another way to make sure this doesn't happen is to define a namespace uri explicitly on the server. This should also cause the client to generate an explicit namespace uri definition.

You can also work around this by not not using a root namespace in your poject.

Note: This issue does not apply to service contracts because the default namespace does not affect wire communications.

XBox Live Video Market place

hoop — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 04:19:00 GMT

"To celebrate its first birthday on November 22, Xbox 360™ becomes the first and only gaming console to provide HD and standard-definition TV shows and movies direct to you."

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/marketplace/moviestv/default.htm

Renting movies from Blockbuster was nice.
Renting movies from Netflix was even better for my lazy but.
Renting movies without ever having to leave the couch is priceless...

.Net Framework 3.0 has Shipped!

hoop — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 04:18:00 GMT

The first product I worked on here at Microsoft has shipped.

http://www.netfx3.com/blogs/news_and_announcements/archive/2006/11/06/.NET-Framework-3.0-has-been-released_2100_.aspx

It's a great feeling.

Back in the game

hoop — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 07:06:00 GMT

After almost a year and a half of not posting to my web log, I'm going try and start up again. To start things out, I'll talk a bit about what I've been doing lately.

For the past 2 years or so I've been working on the Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named "Indigo"). Most of the stuff I work on has something to do with implementing Indigo's support for various metadata specifications (WSDL, WS-Metadata Exchange, WS-Policy etc.).

Hopefully (if I do my job right), most people won't have to know or care too much what any of those specifications are. Things will just work and for the most part tools like svcutil.exe will do the work for you.

Hopeful now that I've stuck my head out in the open again, people will let me know what kind of stuff they'd like to hear from me in this space. I'll try and make the majority of my posts here about Indigo and other closely related technologies although I may insert the occasional post or two about other technologies I'm passionate about. I don't intend to start posting on a daily basis but hopefully I'll be posting more than once every year.

How SharePoint works

hoop — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 06:25:00 GMT

This is an amazing article on the difference between WSS (Windows SharePoint Services ) and (SPS) SharePoint Portal Server and how it all works.

I've always been a huge fan of SharePoint but I have had a love hate relationship of sorts. I love the fact that there is so much in SharePoint that can be customized. the SharePoint UI alone has so many levels at which it can be customized. You could probably completely rewrite the SharePoint UI in ASP.NET and still derive value from the ability to leverage the existing SharePoint Content Databases and the List forms provided by CAML¹. the hate part of the relationship comes from the fact that customizing the existing UI is so simple to start out and then “bam!” you hit a brick wall as the learning curve gains an infinite gradient. And I'm not talking about it becoming harder as you go I'm talking full on second derivatives equals infinity at some point. This is further compounded by the lack of a really good Developer oriented SharePoint editor. FrontPage works great for people who want to customize the Site in a WYSIWYG manor

1: do not read this as an endorsement of CAML

P.S. I haven't posted in a long while because my life has been relatively uninteresting for the past few weeks.

InfoPath SP1

hoop — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 22:10:00 GMT

Chris Anderson led me to this: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/feb04/02-23EnhancedInfoPathPR.asp

I haven't got a chance to play with this yet but I recall talking with Eric just this past weekend about InfoPath We talked about some of the features I felt were missing from it. Looks like I'll soon find out whether my wishes have been granted.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D5ADC839-73F4-4299-ABA0-E88C90B25144&displaylang=en

Getting Dumped

hoop — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 18:12:00 GMT

Craig just dumped Dot. He did it publicly too. It's sad but the letter does have decent comic value, it made me laugh. The question now is does anyone know why GDN workspaces have such bad perf?