[note: this is WSE2 SP2 *pre-release*... not sure if this is “supported“ or not]

Looks like Web Services Enhancements 2.0, Service Pack 2 is now available. The full download can be reached directly at this link.

Some of the things I find most intersting in this service pack:

“A new implementation of the Kerberos token based on SSPI interfaces is included in this release.“ I know some people were having trouble with Kerberos tokens, hopefully this fixes it.

“The inclusion of unencrypted Username tokens in a message may represent a security vulnerability. The SecurityTokenServiceClient class will now automatically encrypt any Username tokens included in a request. Similarly, the SecurityTokenService class will automatically encrypt any username tokens included in a response.“ One word: NEATO.

“SoapService will now send back an empty SoapEnvelope back if the soap method it is invoking returns null for a request/response scenario.“ This would certainly explain a few weird things.

“The Security Settings Wizard can support creating Policy files for remote service.” Oh gotta try this one out next time I am playing around with policy files.

Hopefully I get the time soon to play with some of this, especially the encryption of UserName tokens. That improvement was sorely needed.

It's 6am and I am still awake, writing a blog entry no doubt. That part is perfectly normal.

Whats not normal is that today is now a monday. And I do not have a User Group meeting of some sort marked on my calender for tonight. I can't recall the last monday night where there wasn't a meeting or event to attend. So I am assuming I missed something important.

Please, clue me in!! What meeting/event did I forget to put on my calender??

I know this cannot be right....

Last night was a dual event. We had our first-ever Windows Mobile SIG meeting, and following that many meeting attendees headed to join the “geek dinner” being hosted by Kirk Evans of Microsoft.

I thought the meeting went fairly well, we had roughly 15-20 folks show up. Which isn't bad for a niche group (our C# group is often only half this size, for example). While I was late and missed the introduction talk by Paul Lockwood, I did get to see nearly all of Matt Ranlett's presentation which “covered the bases” of the Compact Framework pretty well. I even snapped a photo using my sweet new Audiovox phone:

Not the clearest picture I know... but come on, it was dark in there!

No, we do not draw straws to see who will be thrown into the stew. We just get together a bunch of true nerds, and we talk for hours about the stuff geeks care about. Mostly computer-related stuff. And since nerds tend to be rather sedentary creatures, we do this while also feeding our faces!

So if you are in or near Atlanta, enjoy playing the “I know more jargon than you” game, and aren't a complete introvert, then make sure you come to this month's Atlanta Geek Dinner.

Unfortunately, it is being held at the same time as another important event, the first meeting of the Atlanta .NET Mobility Group. This meeting will be over at 8pm and is 5 minutes or less from the geek dinner, so I imagine many people (like me) will just be 2 hours late for the dinner.

Seems my county of residence is getting stirred up in the creationism vs evolution “debate”.

Not really sure what to make of it all, except I am really disturbed to know that “More than 2,000 people [my neighbors!] signed a petition opposing the biology texts because they did not discuss alternative theories, including creationism”. This was right here, in this state, in this county. And I always thought Cobb was one of the more “progressive” areas of Georgia.

Whatever happened to seperation of church and state? The founding fathers weren't dummies - they understood what happens when you let religion dictate government. Religious persecution and suppression of intellectual advancement. Thats why church and state are supposed to be disjoint.

Welcome to Jesusland. Enjoy your stay.

This is worth downloading if you dig Southpark...

South Park Reloaded Trailer

I am finally getting around to conversion of this project to SQL Reporting Services from Crystal Reports 10. I cannot believe I am EXCITED to be working with a reporting engine!

Sure it's still a little rough in some places. But it JUST PLAIN WORKS. I admit I was skeptical once about the ability to integrate with a windows forms application since SRS does not currently provide a winforms viewer control (Crystal has this). Well I am a skeptic no more. In just a few hours tonight I managed to gut and replace nearly all of the “plumbing” I had in place for Crystal Reports, and instead I now just host an ActiveX Acrobat Reader control (which looks IMMENSELY more polished to the end user).

Now I get to convert the handful of reports in this application. I wonder if my enthusiasm will survive that part.

Once this phase is done, I am really looking forward to weening their intranet reporting portal from that abomination known as the Crystal Web Viewer Control. It sure will be nice to be able to view reports on their web site without waiting 5 minutes per view and suffering an outright server crash every hour or so.

Crystal Reports: You deserve to die a merciless death.

On monday, November 1, I gave a very hastily prepared presentation on using WSE2 to build service interfaces. I covered contract-first design (using the Visual Studio XSD editor) and alternate protocol support in WSE (SoapServer/SoapClient). I also showed how to divide the code into realistic application layers, including a Service Facade, Service Host(s), Chicken Nuggets (the “pre-existing“ application components), a Client Agent, a Client UI, and a shared service contract (via a shared assembly and XSD). In this presentation, I demonstrated use of both forms of exposing Soap methods, including message-signature based and raw soapenvelope based variations.

In this process, I showed how to build such a design from the ground up, and I tried to touch on most of the common issues that tend to come up. I pointed out the shortcomings of the current XSD compiler, but we also talked about how some of these problems are being addressed in Visual Studio 2005.

Since the presentation, I have done a slight amount of “clean up“ work on the solution's projects. I also incorporated a couple additional topics that were brought up during the presentation.

1. During the presentation, the Service Host was demonstrated only as a Console application. I have now added a native Windows Service application to show the benefit of keeping the Service Facade in a seperate assembly.
2. During the presentation, the question was posed about Schema validation, and could it be done in this context? To demonstrate how to achieve this easily, I have included new code that embeds the XSD into the shared assembly, and uses it at runtime to validate incoming messages.

The complete code (and binaries) for all projects in this solution can be found here:

SOA.zip (180.45 KB)

A couple notes before running these samples:

• The service implementation reads data from the “pubs” database on a local SQL Server instance. The connection string for this is hardcoded, and will need to be modified if you do not have SQL Server installed locally. You will need to ensure that the account running the ServiceConsole and/or the WindowsService (SYSTEM by default) has read access to this database. (Yes, I know this is bad but this part of the project was out of the scope of the presentation)
• To install the WindowsService (which allows you to see it in the “Services” control panel applet), you will need to run “installutil” to register it properly. From the Visual Studio Command Prompt, type “installutil -?” to see how to use this utility.

Blogging has become an instrument of power. Don't believe me? Follow Scoble's link to how this lock manufacturer was devastated by a blog entry.

So powerful, some think it has been swinging the stock market on election day:

“Blogs Send Stocks Lower on Talk of Kerry Victory”

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6693402&src=rss/topNews&section=news

It’s becoming a brave new world out there..