Hoop Somuah : Windows Communication Foundation

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.

.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.