simon.says : Blogs

PDC Debrief

smguest — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:20:00 GMT

Kirill has a great debrief of our Web Services interoperability session at PDC last month.

Also, you may want to checkout the interoperability plugfest that his group is running.

Graham Glass leaves webMethods

smguest — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 20:27:00 GMT

If you haven't heard, Graham Glass, a fellow brit and good friend of mine, has resigned as CTO of webMethods. Graham and I did a lot of work together in his former days at The Mind Electric.

From his blog, Graham says he'll be focusing on a new company concentrating on eduction. If it's anything like his previous ventures I know it will be a huge success.

Good luck Graham!

Custom Exception Handling in Indigo

smguest — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 22:06:00 GMT

One question I frequently get asked is "how do I handle exceptions over Web Services?" If you've ever tried passing exceptions using Web Services you'll likely be able to relate to the issues. The main problem is that the majority of toolkits don't have a great way to deserialize generated SOAP Faults to local exceptions - which means that you have to dig through the SOAP Fault to get an error code or parse the detail message to figure out what when wrong. Keith Brown recently highlighted some of the problems in a recent post.

Fortunately, this is something that Indigo handles beautifully. Here's how it works:

Firstly, you define your custom exception:

[Serializable]

public class MyCustomException : Exception, ISerializable

{

public MyCustomException(string Message)

: base(Message)

{

}

public MyCustomException(SerializationInfo si, StreamingContext sc)

: base(si, sc)

{

}

Notice that the exception is attributed with Serializable, implements ISerializable and has a constructor that accepts SerializationInfo and StreamingContext. All these three are required to correctly serialize the custom exception type over the wire.

In our service contract we attribute the operation that will be generating this exception. Here we mark the custom exception as being a known type and define it as a fault contract.

[OperationContract]

[KnownType(typeof(MyCustomException))]

[FaultContract(typeof(MyCustomException))]

void GiveMeCustomException();

To throw the custom exception from an Indigo service, we generate the custom exception - but then wrap the exception in a SOAP Fault. It is this that is then thrown from the service.

MyCustomException mce = new MyCustomException("Custom problem...");

Fault<MyCustomException> fault = new Fault<MyCustomException>(mce);

throw fault;

On the client, catching these custom exceptions is very easy. You need to reference the shared CustomException type in your project and then...

try

{

// call the operation that generates the exception

}

catch (Fault<MyCustomException>)

{

Console.WriteLine("It worked! Custom Exception!");

}

catch (Exception e)

{

Console.WriteLine("Didn't work. Sorry. "+e.ToString());

}

Then, to map the fault to the local custom exception, you use:

catch (Fault<MyCustomException> fault)

{

Console.WriteLine("It worked! Custom Exception!");

MyCustomException mce = fault.Detail;

}

Finally, you can also add additional fields to the exception (which was Keith's main gripe). To do this, simply create a public property and override the GetObjectData method to handle the serialization correctly:

[Serializable]

public class MyCustomException : Exception, ISerializable

{

private string myValue = "";

public MyCustomException(string Message)

: base(Message)

{

}

public MyCustomException(SerializationInfo si, StreamingContext sc)

: base(si, sc)

{

}

public string MyValue

{

get { return myValue; }

set { myValue = value; }

}

public override void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo si, StreamingContext sc)

{

base.GetObjectData(si, sc);

si.AddValue("MyValue", myValue);

}

From what I've seen, this is an awesome feature and will greatly help the handling of custom exceptions. Thanks go to Israel Burman for helping me get to the bottom of this.

My next task is to see whether I can use the same approach, but map custom exceptions generated on WebSphere 6.0 to custom exceptions in Indigo ;-).

Groktalks at TechEd

smguest — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 22:14:00 GMT

Now, these are my kind of sessions! 10 minutes and to the point. Not to be missed!

Microsoft ARC (Architecture Resource Center)

smguest — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 04:51:00 GMT

Our team has released a new architecture section on microsoft.com.

Check it out to see:

The latest issue of the Architect Journal
Architecture focused events and Webcasts
Details on the Microsoft Certified Architect program
Architect-related blogs and bloggers

Microsoft at TechEd also ;-)

smguest — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 03:36:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my last post I'll be at JavaOne this year - but before that of course I'll be making my way down to TechEd!

I'll be presenting on Saturday 4th for TechEd Academic at the University of Florida. I always enjoy the academic sessions as it helps put different perspectives on many topics.

After the weekend, my main session at TechEd is CSI354 on Wednesday 8th at 5.30pm. I can only apologize for the time (yeah, 5.30pm wouldn't be my first pick), but hope that you'll join me and not wait until the post-conference DVD. We've been working hard this year to show things that "have only been talked about" until now! (…and yes, that's all I'm giving away!). In between, be sure to stop at the ARC cabana where my team will be hanging out.

If you are looking for a good list of recommended sessions, check out Scott Hanselman's list here. In addition to these, I'm personally looking forward to the HOLs (Hands On Labs). I find these especially useful for those products that fit the "I should know more about that" category.

Hope to see you there...

Microsoft at JavaOne

smguest — Tue, 24 May 2005 21:33:00 GMT

As you may have read from TheServerSide's post or through other articles, Microsoft will be attending JavaOne this year in San Francisco. We've been working with Sun over the past few months to put together an Interoperability track on the Tuesday of the conference.

The track includes the following sessions:

* TS-3552: Interoperability Track Keynote - come to hear Mark Hapner (Distinguished Engineer) from Sun and Andrew Laymen (Director of Distributed Systems) from Microsoft kick off the interoperability track! Mark and Andrew will be covering WS-* Web Services Architecture.

* TS-9886: Advanced Web Services Interoperability - this is a session I'll be co-presenting with Raghavan Srinivas. Rags and I will be discussing recommendations and strategies for using Web Services to interoperate between Java and .NET today.

* BOF-9095: "On the Couch with Microsoft and Sun" - this is a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session that Marina Fisher (Sun) and I submitted. The format is simple: 3 people from Microsoft (Doug Purdy, Dino Chiesa and myself). 3 people from Sun (Marina, Ray Lai and Laurence Moroney). An audience. An independent moderator. No agenda. No PowerPoint. Come and ask open questions to the panel about any interoperability related issues on your mind!

* TS-3367: Interoperability using Techniques other than Web Services - everyone is aware that there are many ways to achieve interoperability between Java and .NET. In his session (on Thursday), Kevin Wittkopf from Microsoft will be examining some of these. Expect to hear about different types of connectors, bridges and RMI/Remoting techniques.

In addition, we have a booth on the exhibitors floor. We encourage you to come up and ask us questions after the sessions about something you may have heard - or even if you just have general questions about how we interoperate with Java today.

So, what's the hidden agenda here? Well, quite simply there is none. I think I speak for all of us attending JavaOne when I say that we believe there is a great interoperability story between Java and .NET - and feel that JavaOne is a great conference for that story to be told.

Hope to see you there!

Kirill is Blogging!

smguest — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 13:48:00 GMT

Kirill is blogging. Here he shares some great information on WS-Security interop between WSE 2.0 SP3 and IBM WebSphere 6.0...

JAR Hell

smguest — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 16:32:00 GMT

Dino posts an amusing story about "JAR Hell" and battling with 7 copies of the log4j.jar library...

Accessing MSMQ from Java

smguest — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:09:00 GMT

Here's a nice post from Dino showing options (and alas a solution) for accessing MSMQ libraries from Java. I haven't tried the sample code yet, but it looks like a good approach.

Steve Maine on Isomorphism

smguest — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 05:20:00 GMT

I'm a little late catching up with some blog reading but (if you haven't seen it already) here is a nice post from Steve Maine on Isomorphism. I especially like the metaphor when used with the REST example at the end of the article.

Chris on Managing Security Context Tokens (SCTs) in a Web Farm

smguest — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 22:01:00 GMT

Chris Keyser (whose office is actually next to mine) releases a new MSDN article on "Managing Security Context Tokens in a Web Farm". This is something that he's been working on for the past few months, and is definitely worth the read for those looking to extend the WSE 2.0 implementation of WS-SecureConversation.

Contract First Web Services Interoperability with IBM WebSphere

smguest — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 17:34:00 GMT

Dino Chiesa and team release a new article on MSDN covering Contract First interoperability with IBM WebSphere. Dino’s approach echoes much of the discussion currently around Schema, Message, Data and Code first development for Web Services.

Definitely a recommended read: This is now also in the articles section on the MSDN Web Services Interoperability home page.

Interop Bloggers!

smguest — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 17:29:00 GMT

A couple of discovered blogs with Interop in mind:

Dino’s DotNetInterop blog

Chris Green’s Interoperability blog

Subscribed!

Do you have what it takes to write for MSDN?

smguest — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:20:00 GMT

This week sees a new article on the MSDN Web Services Interoperability page: Improving Web Service Interoperability by Aaron Skonnard.

In his article Aaron talks about how interoperability requires teamwork, a good understanding of Web Services Profiles and also looks at some of the WS-I testing tools in action. Definitely a recommended read.

Reading this brings up a good point: Do you have what it takes to write for MSDN? Do you have an article (or even an idea for an article) that you would like to see live on the MSDN Web Services Interoperability page? Would you like to share your ideas and thoughts with thousands of readers?

If the answer to these is yes, click on the "contact" link to the left and drop me a note!