simon.says : Interoperability

WSCF 0.6 Released!

smguest — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 04:48:00 GMT

Congratulations to Christian and the guys over at Thinktecture on their v0.6 release of WSCF!

New features include support for .NET Fx 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, together with partial classes, nullable types, SOAP 1.2, generics and a host of other goodies.

How can you tell if a “Web Service” really is a Web Service?

smguest — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 00:18:00 GMT

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 list of 10 things that point you in the right direction… and welcome any that I've missed.

1. Uses WSDL. A Web Service should expose its service contract using WSDL. If it can’t give you a WSDL document, it’s probably just XML over HTTP…

2. Uses SOAP. All messages sent from and received by the Web Service must use SOAP formatting. If it’s not using SOAP it’s probably just XML over HTTP…

3. Uses XSD. All data types in the SOAP payload must be XSD compliant. No platform native types are allowed. If it’s not using XSD it’s probably just XML over HTTP…

4. Uses XML. The underlying messages should of course be formatted using XML.

5. No Arbitrary Binary Data. The message payload should 7 bit ASCII and should contain no embedded binary blobs. Any binary data passed over a Web Service should be sent using either SwA, DIME or MTOM (preferably MTOM).

6. Transport is likely to be HTTP. Although not a requirement, the majority of Web Services today use HTTP as the transport. Compliant Web Services should definitely work over HTTP.

7. Discovery can be through UDDI. Again although not a requirement, it should be possible to host the Web Service endpoint using UDDI.

8. Agreed Versions of Specifications. The versions of the above specifications (WSDL, SOAP, XSD, XML, HTTP, UDDI) should be in line with the latest version of the WS-I Basic Profile (http://www.ws-i.org) – to ensure Web Service compliance between vendors.

9. Operations should be Document Style. Operations to/from a Web Service should be Document/Message Style (e.g. SendOrder(order o)). RPC style should be avoided (e.g. SetOrderLine1(orderId id)).

10. Should be compliant with WS-*. Compliant Web Services should be able to accept WS-* payloads and extensions for Security, Reliability and Transactions (although not all stacks today support these yet).

Interoperability BOF at PDC - Microsoft with Sun

smguest — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 03:44:00 GMT

Interested in interoperability betwen .NET and Java? Then come to tomorrow's (Monday's) BOF session at PDC and hear speakers from both Microsoft and Sun talk about the subject. Here are the details:

Monday 12, 9:30pm, Room 511A - Interoperability: .NET, Java, Windows & Solaris

Creating Word documents on IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic

smguest — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 02:48:00 GMT

Running IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic or another J2EE application server? Wish you could generate server-side Microsoft Word documents without any third party add-ins? With Microsoft Office 2003 and an XML reference schema called WordML, you can do this today.

Here's the first part in a series that shows you how.

New Version of WSE Trace Tool

smguest — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 19:57:00 GMT

I caught up with Benjamin Mitchell at TechEd Europe this year and we chatted briefly about WSE Trace - a small tool that I put together to help with viewing of traces generated by WSE. Given that there is still some interest in this I thought it was overdue for a little update.

As a result, I've uploaded a new version of WSE Trace (v2.0 beta) to the workspaces site. The goal of the tool remains the same:

- Easy to run and copy between machines (it's still only a single 523k .exe!)

- Very easy to setup (yep, just run the .exe)

- Transport Independent

- Free of any modifications to app.config or other files

Version 2.0 supports all the features of previous releases, plus:

Integration with Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Just select the "install into Visual Studio .NET" option in the tool to show the trace option in Solution Explorer:

Note: Installation and un-installation of the tool does not require an MSI! Hey, this is easier to install than an Eclipse add-in! ;-)

WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 Compliance

If you have the WS-I testing tool installed, now you can right click on any message, select Basic Profile -> Analyze Message to run a WS-I Basic Profile compliance check on the message.

Most Recently Used Projects

Rather than selecting the directory every time, I've put in a MRU list to easily select previous projects you have traced.

That's it - click here to get to the workspace to download. Also note that this new version of the trace tool only supports WSE 2.0 SP3 and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. On my list of things to look at are WSE 3.0, Visual Studio 2005 and of course Indigo.

A few of you have been asking for the source code for this tool. There is nothing I would like better than to share this with people (and hopefully get others adding more functionality). I'll therefore be uploading this to the workspace very soon.

MTOM Blogcast

smguest — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:19:00 GMT

For those that didn't get to attend my session at JavaOne or TechEd Europe this year, here is a 5 minute "blog cast" of my MTOM interop demo - as I described in this earlier post. See how easy it is to use WSE 3.0 CTP and JAX-WS to send a binary attachment between Java and .NET. (...oh, and apologies in advance for my slow VPC!)

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 ;-).

How to do MTOM Interop

smguest — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:46:00 GMT

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 for optimizing the transmission and/or wire format of SOAP messages. Primarily this means that we have a new standard that allows the sending of attachments over Web Services - one that the industry agrees on, and one that is composable with the other WS-* specifications.

The demo showed WSE 3.0 CTP (which can be downloaded here) returning a PowerPoint deck to a Java client using JAX-WS EA 2.0 (which can be downloaded here). This is how it works:

The WSE service defines a method called GetFileBinary:

[WebMethod]

public byte[] GetFileBinary(String fileName)

{
String filePath = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory + @"App_Data\" + fileName;

return File.ReadAllBytes(filePath);

}

As you can see the method returns an array of bytes. To enable MTOM encoding we use the following switch in the web.config file:

When we call the method the binary representation of the attachment appears within the body of the SOAP response (although actually this is an abstract representation of the multiple MIME messages that are physically sent on the wire).

So, how do we call this in Java? Well, first we create a new instance of the service using JAX-WS EA 2.0 and call the GetFileBinary method:

ServiceFactory serviceFactory = ServiceFactory.newInstance();

Service service = (Service)serviceFactory.createService(new URL("http://localhost:8080/dotNETWS/Service.asmx?WSDL"), Service.class);

ServiceSoap soap = service.getServiceSoap();

SOAPBinding binding = (SOAPBinding)((BindingProvider)soap).getBinding();

binding.setMTOMEnabled(true);

Notice how we also set the MTOMEnabled flag on the binding of the service. When the method is called, an array of bytes is returned. We simply output to a FileOutputStream:

byte[] fileData = soap.getFileBinary("JavaOne.ppt");

FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\Desktop\\JavaOne.ppt");

fos.write(fileData);

fos.flush();

fos.close();

..and there we have the attachment! Anyone that has done anything with SwA or DIME interop in the past will hopefully recognize the progress that we are making in this area - testament I believe to how Microsoft and Sun has been working together on these specifications. From a presenter's point of view, it was also nice to see how easy this demo was to put together (even if it was done just a few hours before my presentation ;-)

What's next? I am working with Arun Gupta from Sun to formally write up the demo into a whitepaper and sample download that we'll post on both sites. After that we'll be working on showing Secure MTOM (WS-Security + MTOM) to demonstrate how attachments can be sent securely between Web Service endpoints.

Update from JavaOne

smguest — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:31:00 GMT

Wow, here I am at JavaOne! It’s kind of odd... I’ve been doing Java development for a number of years now and I realize that this is my first visit to JavaOne. (What’s more ironic is that I had to wait to join Microsoft before I went ;-)

So, what have we been up to - and what are we doing? Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the Interop track at JavaOne, so if you are here, be sure to check out the sessions that are lined up. You can get a full run down of these on page 118 of the JavaOne Program Guide. In particular I’d like to draw your attention to our BOF session on Wednesday evening at 7.30pm (Hall E 340) – “On the Couch with Sun and Microsoft”. This is an open Q&A session where you can put forward any question you may have about getting products on both platforms to work together.

Raghavan Srinivas (from Sun) and I have been working on the demos for tomorrow's Advanced Web Services Interoperability session (TS-9866). We are to the wire, but looking pretty good. We'll be showing WS-Security, WS-RM, and even MTOM interop between .NET and Java. Not sure what MTOM is? Then you'll want to join us at 2.45pm to find out! On your way, be sure to visit the Microsoft booth in the pavillion. We are #440, next to the lunch hall - we have a great collection of demos (running on 64-bit AMD Sun hardware) and a team of experts ready to take questions.

So far, my experience of JavaOne this year has very positive - it's been great to hear what people are doing, and talking with them about their perceptions of Microsoft and their interests around Interoperability. The highlight of Monday had to be meeting Scott McNealy (and giving him a copy of my book) when he visited our booth ;-)

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!

Channel9 Fun cont'd

smguest — Wed, 18 May 2005 03:17:00 GMT

Did I also mention that the C9 demo mentioned in my last post shows BEA WebLogic (running on Red Hat Linux) creating a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet - using a technology called Office XML?

Channel9 Fun

smguest — Tue, 17 May 2005 09:19:00 GMT

Here's a 34 minute video that Robert, Karsten and I put together for Channel 9. In it I show how we can take a mainframe app, BEA WebLogic running on Red Hat and some Office XML, mix it together and front it with an interface written in Avalon.

WS-Security Interop using WSE 2.0 and Sun JWSDP 1.5

smguest — Fri, 13 May 2005 07:48:00 GMT

An update to my WS-Security interop series got posted today. This article shows WS-Security interoperability (using X.509 certs) between WSE 2.0 and Sun's JWSDP (Java Web Services Developer Pack) 1.5.

Office Redistributable PIAs available

smguest — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 21:29:00 GMT

News from Harry - the Office 2003 PIAs (Primary Interop Assemblies) are now available as a separate, redistributable download. This is great news for developers building apps that interoperate with Microsoft Office 2003.