Articles filed in category 'Web Services'

Web services are all about connecting businesses in a standard and secure manner.For a real-life Web service, security is intrinsic to every facet of operation and no party would ever agree to interact with a non-secure Web service. Unfortunately, Web services security is still in its infancy; standards such as WS-I are just emerging and there is no built-in support in the development tools for them. That being said, there are quite a few programming techniques you can u...se today in .NET 1.1 to secure your Web services, and do so in a way that will ease the transition to future standards and protocols.See More

In this article, Rick plays with the beta version of ASP.NET vNext. You’ll get to see what’s (probably) coming so you can start making plans.

Part 3, The User Interface and the Rating Web ServiceWe are finally going to get our feet wet in Visual Studio .NET and start writing some real code! In this article, we're going to focus on two areas of the ACME application. First, we will talk about the user interface and how it's implemented in ASP.NET ? along with a few problems we overcame by utilizing the powerful object-oriented features of .NET. Next, we'll write a web service in Visual Basic .NET to rate polic...ies based on their class codes. To demonstrate that web services can be used in a variety of ways, we'll consume the web service in both .NET and Visual FoxPro 7.See More

Microsoft recently released the ASP.NET MVC 4.0 beta and along with it, the brand spanking new ASP.NET Web API. Web API is an exciting new addition to the ASP.NET stack that provides a new, well-designed HTTP framework for creating REST and AJAX APIs (API is Microsoft’s new jargon for a service, in case you’re wondering). Although Web API currently ships and installs with ASP.NET MVC 4, you can use Web API functionality in any ASP.NET project, including WebForms, WebPage...s and MVC or none of the above. You can also self-host Web API in your own applications.See More

Have you ever wondered how to use your browser (and those of your customers) as rich clients without plug-ins or ActiveX objects? Shawn Wildermuth tells you how.

Jan/Feb 2008 Doc Detective COlumn.

Both ASP.NET MVC and the ADO.NET Entity Framework are both very popular topics right now in the developer community.Having spoken at various user group meeting and code camps it is very obvious to me what topics a lot of developers are interested in. I see that sessions about ASP.NET MVC or the Entity Framework are always packed with developers eager for more information. The focus of this article is the Entity Framework, but in the context of an ASP.NET MVC application.... As such, I am assuming at least basic understanding of ASP.NET MVC but little-to-none with Entity Framework.See More

The official release of Microsoft's Web Services Enhancements (WSE) toolkit promises to help developers deal with at least some of the pain and suffering accompanying the emerging Web services' standards.Updated to support the OASIS WS-Security specification and a promising WS-Policy specification, developers will be able to build standards-compliant Web services in less time and with less code.

Imagine that you need some specific information in your application, such as a shipping rate. You now go to a special "service" search engine and look up the type of service you need over the Web.Now, imagine that you can get this information easily from the service and simply plug it directly into your application. Sound too good to be true? Believe it or not, the technologies to make this possible are available today. Web Services provide this functionality by bringing... to application development the same interlinked mechanisms that have made the Web so popular for Web browsing. By sharing data over the Web in standard formats, "Web Services" is becoming the new industry buzzword. Microsoft is talking about Web Services as the second life of the Internet. Web Services will tie together applications, just as the Web Browser and URL links have tied together Web pages. "The Web At Your Service" is the new mantra. In this article, Rick discusses SOAP and Web Services, then creates a sample Web Service and integrates it into an application.See More

The CODE Framework is an open-source application framework by the makers of CODE Magazine. It is entirely free of charge. It covers a wide range of features that can be applied altogether or individually in an À la carte fashion. All of these features revolve around a single concept: Building advanced business applications in a productive and maintainable fashion while maintaining great application architecture. In this article, we are focusing on a subset of the CODE Fr...amework, specifically the components used to build WPF applications using the MVVM and MVC patterns.See More

Do you test your software before you release it? Of course you do, but are you testing it as effectively as you could be? When do you start testing? How do you know when you have tested it enough? Who does the testing? This article will explore the various strategies of creating a comprehensive testing process for your software development project.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a collection of architectural principles combined to integrate new and existing applications both within the enterprise and in business to business or partner integration scenarios. This article (Part 1) will provide a conceptual overview of BizTalk Server 2006 and how it serves to address the problem domain common in the EAI space. In Part 2, I’ll introduce a business case for implementing an online ordering and fulfillment sy...stem and provide a step-by-step example of how to implement a solution that addresses the problem domain.See More

The TV commercials took me and many others by surprise. A stream-of-conscienceless-style ad that had our brains struggling to catch up with the next topic that the next person blurted out. Funny enough, the bouncing from topic to topic by the actors in the commercial seem to be a familiar metaphor to anyone that has traversed search results at one time or another. And at the end, a familiar logo appears: Microsoft, followed by a not-so-familiar one: Bing.

In episode #337 (jeez, can you believe we’ve produced so many shows?) Richard and I talked to Jim Webber, Global Architecture Lead for Thoughtworks, about his favorite topic, Guerilla SOA.

May/June 2005 .NET Rocks Column

Markus Egger discusses the need to create multi-threaded applications.

Google now offers the functionality of its search engine through a Web service.Over the past couple years, Google has become the most popular search engine used on the Web. Building upon its popularity, Google has developed additional search accessories and interfaces for both personal and commercial use. The most powerful interface offered by Google is exposure of its database and search capabilities through the use of a Web service.

Peter introduces you to GraphQL so your REST API client list can grow and change without a lot of pain. You can use strongly typed schema, eliminated over- and under-fetching, and you can get analytics about how clients are really using your API.

.NET My Services is Microsoft's first attempt at creating a professional, commercial and widely available Web Services platform.The .NET My Services umbrella hosts a number of different Web services, such as a Calendar service, a Contacts repository, and much, much more. These services are major building blocks for the "Everywhere, Anytime" vision, but best of all, they are relatively easy to implement and use in your own applications and Web sites!

So much of the literature about writing application now involves Web services.Many publications and blogs consider Web services to be the silver bullet because they are so easy to implement in .NET and do very easily interoperate with disconnected systems. But are people really using Web services the way they should be used? I beg to differ on that point.

In 2007, Microsoft unveiled a new vision called “Software + Services” that would fundamentally change the way that both Microsoft and their customers build software and have a gradual, yet marked ripple effect throughout the software giant’s entire strategy.

Crystal Reports is officially a member of the Visual Studio .NET product.It is included in all major editions and ships in all languages available with Visual Studio .NET. Crystal Reports .NET provides developers with the fastest, most productive way to create and integrate presentation-quality, interactive reports that scale to meet the demands of end users. This article introduces you to Crystal Reports .NET and shows you how to create reports and view them in either a... Windows form or a Web form. I will also show you how to publish a report as a Web service and consume the service in a Web form.See More

Have you ever wanted to implement search capabilities on your own Web site but didn’t want to implement the logic and deal with issues such as storage and indexing? The Live Search team now offers two different ways to utilize Search on your site: using the Live Search Box or using the Windows Live Search API.

Windows Live Messenger is one of the central offerings nestled among a suite of products and services under Microsoft’s Windows Live brand.For years online chat has been progressively and swiftly revolutionizing how you communicate with your friends, family, coworkers, and businesses you deal with. It is the foundation of the original chat room concept and the heart of instant messaging applications. Online chat-also called instant messaging or just “IM”-connects people ...for one-to-one or group chat, for social networking purposes, or for business directives, such as enabling access to technical support, customer services, or sales. Now, Windows Live Messenger supports a rich set of features for Web applications through the Windows Live Messenger IM Control, the Windows Live Messenger Presence API, and the Windows Live Messenger Library. The collective features of these products go beyond the simplicity of a chat application, making it possible to embrace this new era of social networking by leveraging your built-in Windows Live network within any Web application.See More

Since its introduction in 2008, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 has been touted as a platform for rapid application development.We’ve always been hard core C# and ASP.NET snobs, but we were intrigued by the value that Dynamics CRM promised. We set out to build our next generation software product on that platform, and learned a lot about what’s real and what’s not so real. In this article, we will share the rollercoaster ride of our experience developing our software product ...on this new CRM “platform.”See More

WCF 4 is all about productivity.

Web Services is a powerful technology, even in its basic form.However, with .NET, you can easily couple Web Services with .NET's new data services to provide a powerful data delivery mechanism that works over the Web, making it possible to build distributed applications that work easily without a local data store. In this article, Rick describes various ways you can use Web Services and ADO.NET DataSets to pass data between client and server applications to build truly disconnected applications.

Be aware that this is not going to be a classic how-to article that delves more or less deeply into some technical issue or feature. It is, instead, an article that aims at providing an overview of the options you have at present for architecting Web solutions.

Indigo is the next generation application connectivity and services from Microsoft, superseding the variety of .NET connectivity solutions available today: ASMX Web services, Remoting, and Enterprise Services. Since .NET debuted some five years ago, all three technologies have been inundated in either hype or misconceptions. With Indigo around the corner, it is time to take a long hard look at these three technologies, and separate fact from myth so that you will be best... prepared for Indigo. This article starts by examining the existing technologies, describing their merits and shortcomings, putting them in the correct perspective of a modern distributed application, and suggests where to best apply them. Then the article briefly describes the Indigo programming model, and assesses how to best mitigate the cost of the migration.See More

In the world of browser-based development, interoperability is king. Unfortunately, interoperability can be at the expense of performance.

Service-Oriented Architecture, or SOA, is the newest acronym to become a buzzword among developers, IT Managers, and CTOs.It seems that everyone is talking about making an SOA and how much it will improve their operations, yet most people are hard-pressed to define not only what an SOA is, but also to quantify what specific value it might provide to their organizations. Many simply assert that their SOA architecture comprises a group of Web Services through which they ca...n expose business logic over the Internet.See More

This installment of the Baker’s Dozen presents an introduction to remoting and remoting interfaces.

This article will present a crash-course in the basics of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF is one of the exciting new capabilities in the .NET 3.0 Framework. It provides a unified and uniform programming model for building distributed applications. Those who previously built multiple code bases to deal with Web services and .NET remoting will surely come to appreciate the power standardization that WCF offers. WCF, like any other new technology, requires resea...rch and experimentation to become productive. This article will assume no prior experience with WCF, and will walk you through some basic exercises and steps to show WCF’s capabilities.See More

Increasingly, we rely on NuGet Packages in our .NET Development efforts. When you need to add a library to your project, whether it is Entity Framework, AutoMapper, jQuery, etc., NuGet makes that task a simple one. What happens when you are on a plane, train, an automobile - in some circumstance where you are not online and consequently, not connected to your NuGet package source? This is where a local NuGet package source comes in handy. Locally, we can easily stand up ...an IIS-based NuGet package source. While useful, that is not the simplest thing we can do. Fortunately, the NuGet authors had the foresight and wisdom to allow us to create file directory-based NuGet package sources. This brief article will take you through the steps to create your own local NuGet package source.See More

Rick Strahl Commentary JanFeb2002

Along with an easy site with which you can access your account, there are many really cool Twitter clients out there. This is thanks to an exposed API that you can use to access all of Twitter’s features. The great thing is that this API uses a technology that WCF has embraced completely; I’m talking about REST. Though you can certainly use straight network programming to access and update your Twitter account, why not use the technology that Microsoft has put all their ...eggs into as far as communications programming is concerned? Twitter is, after all, all about communicating, right?See More

The richest set of cloud computing services comes from a little e-commerce company known as Amazon.com. Developers can access the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform using numerous tools including the .NET platform.Amazon.com is a major player in the cloud computing space and has numerous services available to developers. In late 2009, Amazon released the AWS SDK for .NET. This article will demonstrate using the AWS SDK to create a custom backup service using the Amazon S...imple Storage Service (S3).See More

Web services with Visual FoxPro (VFP) have never been easy. The most common Web service tool for FoxPro is the SOAP Toolkit, which has been discontinued and which had a host of problems when dealing with complex types passed over Web Services. In this article I’ll show how you can leverage the powerful Web service features of .NET and the new Windows Communication Foundation in your FoxPro application through COM Interop.

Dino explores the new ASP.NET features and takes a close look at the ways it might benefit you to upgrade (or not).

Microsoft has added an abundance of new features and functionality to ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. This article provides an overview of many of those new features and enhancements ranging from improved editors for HTML, CSS and JavaScript all the way through to publishing your work to the web.

When developing with Windows Live services, you open your application to a whole new world of software integration. In this fascinating realm of mash-up mania, developers can find tools for adding maps, searches, video, chats, and even social networking services directly into their applications and ultimately right into their users’ browsers. The benefit of adding services like Virtual Earth and Silverlight Streaming are obvious-creating dazzling content and facilitating... rich user experiences. Yet services like these are still limited to specific contexts within your program. They are perfectly wonderful for beefing up the user experience in Web sites, but wouldn’t it be great if the folks at Microsoft provided a service that helps you administer user accounts and customize services around your Web site? Well indeed they have, and its name is Windows Live Admin Center (admincenter.live.com).See More

XML is everywhere from XML Web Services to databases to config files to Office documents. This article will show you tooling support offered in Visual Studio 2008 that will make working with XML easier. It will cover editing XML files, working with XML schemas, debugging XSLT style sheets and extending Visual Studio by writing your own custom XML Designers.