Wow, my post on the pet shop application has generated quite a few comments.  I wanted to clear up a couple of things, and make a couple of comments.  1. I personally believe you can write performant, scalable systems with either Java/J2EE or .NET.  It’s all a matter of good design.  And I certainly didn’t mean to [...]

I don’t just mean GUI design – I mean the down-and-dirty work with Windows user interface controls.  I had almost forgotten.95% of my work today is server-side code, and most of that directly related to web services.  But for the last day or so, I’ve been working on a managed GUI component for a client.  [...]

Someone just posted a link to this benchmarking research done by Middleware Company on the WinTech Offtopic list. Considering Middleware Co. specializes in Java technology training, you’d be skeptical of some skewing in favor of Java, but all the benchmarks clearly show the .NET implementation blowing the doors off the Java implementation. Not only that, but in less lines of code! [...]

I’ve gotten a bunch of e-mail recently, asking how to use the debugger when using my Basic or Digest authentication HTTP modules.  The problem is, if you disable Integrated Windows authentication on a virtual directory, the VS.NET debugger will be unable to start debugging within that vdir.Here’s what I do. Say I have a virtual [...]

Prompted by a few questions, I thought I’d post about using my Basic and Digest authentication modules with .NET remoting. As you’re probably aware, .NET remoting does not include (out of the box) any built-in authentication mechanism. However, you can leverage IIS to authenticate requests if you wish; Ingo discusses using the IIS implementations of [...]

There was a lot of talk at the DevCon about writing your web service interface first in WSDL, and then implementing it in code.  This is in contrast to the method that the current tools tend to encourage; for example, with VS.NET, you can write your code, decorate the methods with [WebMethod], and automatically generate [...]

I’m leaving in the morning for the Web Services DevCon.  If anyone who’s going wants to meet up out there, send me a note!

A dozen or so of us have been tossing around a lot of great ideas in the Groove Experiments shared space. One of our concerns, of course, is how to seemlessly share our findings publically with a wide public mechanism. Tonight, we decided to re-focus completly in a new direction, one direction. We felt that [...]

Similarly, Sabre Inc. (www.sabre.com) provides customers access to its Web services by supplying a module that runs on its partners’ Web sites. The XML Travel Toolkit module is designed to let partner companies build Web sites to allow their customers to book travel. For instance, a brick-and-mortar travel agent would build a Web site, and [...]

Microsoft Corp. and IBM, which, along with VeriSign Inc., published the original Web Services-Security specification, are now in two camps that have contrasting views over what should be done with the specification, also known as WS-Security.  [eWeek]Microsoft and IBM disagreeing?  Ah, the world is coming back to normal.  Maybe the stock market will bounce back [...]