Daily Archives: March 31, 2006

“Outsourcing Arguments Pro & Con” Panel at Middlebury May 3rd

dotNET

D.K. Smith Forum presents:

“Outsourcing:  Opportunity or Threat?”

Wednesday, May 3, 2006, 4:30-6:00 P.M.

216 McCardell Bicentennial Hall, Middlebury College

A reception will follow in the Tormondsen Great Hall

Moderator

Pieter J. Schiller ’60, Partner(retired), Advanced Technology Ventures, Waltham, MA

Panelists

Nick Laird ’88, Chief Executive Officer, Global Realty Outsourcing.  GRO is one of the leading providers of business process outsourcing solutions to the real estate and financial services industries.
Michael E. Zeliger, Partner, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, Nicholson, Graham, LLP.
  Mr. Zeliger focuses his practice on complex civil litigation, with particular emphasis on patent and other intellectual property litigation.
Scott Hardy, Founder and President, NEOS Overshoes.  New England Overshoes is a Vermont firm designing and selling “performance overshoes” for personal, recreational and professional use.

In The World is Flat, Tom Friedman contends that software, the global fiber-optic network and ubiquitous Internet access is fundamentally altering virtually every aspect of our lives. For one, it is empowering individuals, groups and countries to collaborate and compete globally:

   We are all becoming neighbors.

   People can now go global seamlessly.

   Outsourcing is a direct consequence of a flat world, and is here to stay.

   Distance no longer insulates us from competition or impedes seizing global opportunities.

   We can now run global businesses, collaborate with (outsource to) partners and feel competition from around the globe without ever leaving home.

   Globalization is fundamentally altering how:

        People

            Are educated and prepare themselves for careers;

            Communicate and establish, build and maintain relationships;

            Work and play; and

        Companies

            Conceive, launch and grow entrepreneurial enterprises;

            Develop and secure intellectual property;

            Operate within increasingly transparent, global supply chains; and

            Compete and collaborate for markets and customers.

Questions and Issues

Does outsourcing jobs really mean we are outsourcing America? Or does outsourcing create more jobs than it moves offshore?

Does outsourcing mean that America will not be able to compete in anything, and that eventually there will be no jobs here?

If so, how do we explain the fact that, because outsourcing is making it so much more efficient and competitive, U.S. manufacturing is increasingly healthy, growing, and vibrant?

What are the implications of a “flat world” for intellectual property?

   Can companies secure world-wide protection? What are the critical factors and costs?

   What are the distinctions between “hard” products like shoes and machinery, and “soft” products like business processes, software and services?

   How do we deal with the reality that some countries do not recognize IP?

   How are courts looking at IP in this new environment?

A special thanks to the late Edward Schaefer ’56, Laura Schaefer Buckley ’79 and Edward Schaefer III ’84 for their generosity in establishing the Professor David K. Smith Visiting Economic Lecture Series in honor of David K. Smith’s work as a teacher and mentor at Middlebury College.

This event is free and open to the public.

Questions?

E-mail mosborne@middlebury.edu

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

WSE3 with WCF February CTP

Indigo

Everything I thought I knew about how to interop messages between WCF and WSE3.0 went down the toilet with the newest bits of WCF.

Thanks to some serious counseling from William Tay this morning (who has been diving deep with WCF for a long time and has also kept up with the changes that affect all forms of interop, even WSE3.0) and then lots of hours of just trying, failing, thinking, adjusting (rinse and repeat) I finally got a WCF client app to talk to a WSE3.0 secured web service using a UsernameforCertificate binding/policy.

And yes, it’s all secured on the wire. I had every problem. Wrong X509 certificates installed, wrong encryption algorithms, hitting a few WCF bugs and more. Luckily, all of the work I have done with WSE3.0 has helped me prepare for troubleshooting this stuff. To me, that is one of the most important lessons!

Here are a few of the things I can share.

I was doing what Willie tells me is the hardest thing with interop – UsernameOverCertificate. But being bullheaded I had to go forward with it.

I tried writing my own, but didn’t understand well enough (though now I think I could tackle that) and instead used WSEHttpBinding that is a custom binding in one of the WCF samples.

That binding uses the Aes128 algorithm for it’s default security binding and secure conversation. I kept getting a message that the algorithm was insufficient to encrypt and key wrap. Changing them both to Aes256 fixed that. It took me a while to realize there were two spots to change, but I had the right idea! Uggh.

At one point, I was still getting an error, but looking at the web service’s trace, I could see that everything on that end had finally happened correctly. Therefore the problem was on the client side. Google gave me ONE response, and naturally it was from a blog post of Willie’s! He had seen a similar problem in the Sept. CTP, but it was enough to fix my problem (Feb CTP).

Since this stuff is still in flux, I think I will wait for WCF beta2 to be released before I attempt to update my article on preparing WSE3 web services for WCF. Truly the hard part (until the new bits are all sorted out) is writing the WCF client. I didn’t have to do anything to my web service to get this to work.

Willie’s got a pair of great articles on WCF on The Server Side (first, second) and I hear there’s a WSE3/WCF interop article coming soon from him as well. Lucky or the rest of us!

I will never have the deep knowledge of this stuff hat Willie and his compadres (Michele Butamante, Christian Weyer, Juval Lowy, etc.) have, but as long as I am willing to battle this stuff out so that I can share it with other programmers who are floating on the surface, I’ll keep at it.

I’ll be looking at more of this stuff in my WSE3 for WCF session at DevConnections next week. My focus is on making sure the WSE3 services are written correctly so that you can talk to them in the future from WCF. I won’t be teaching WCF. You can go across the hall to see Michele for that.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org