Thom Robbins (our D.E. here in New England) put together a cool little pocket pc RSS feed reader app with .NET CF. Check it out here.

This is a great interview. Rebecca, who is a program manager for Advanced Web Services at MS and Jorgen, p.m. for Web Services Standards at MS, are interviewed on webservices.org.

They talk about Microsofts stance on web services, WSE being the “speedboat” to implementing WS-* specs today (while they will be baked into core services – aka Indigo – in the future) and more. They were asked some tough questions … such as Microsoft and others’ proprietary specs (although with ws-addressing now in the hands of w3c, it may not be proprietary for long…) and some fun questions like what are your favorite specs. Also, as Microsoft is refining it’s message about Indigo (and especially that little “remoting“ issue) it is interesting to see this bubbling up to the top:

Don speaks of four tenets to service orientation “services are autonomous”, “have explicit boundaries”, “services share schema, contract, not class”, and “share policy”.

And not about passing objects around.

They also have a great explanation about WSE enabling developers to pick & choose which specs you want to implement and what definitiosn you want.

Take a look at SoapContext properties to see this in action. It gives you easy access to stuffing info into the soap header based on the various specs available and each one of these has properties or collections where you can supply whatever rules or information suit your particular need. For example SoapContext.Security.Tokens or SoapContect.Security.Elements or SoapContext.Addressing.EndPointReference.

What a pair. What a lesson. Go check it out!

I’m going to be doing a lot of work in WSE2 over the next few months …so if you are like me and think this stuff is just for plumbers like Michele L.B. or Christian Weyer or Bristowe, etc., you can witness a normal person actually understanding and heck, even USING WSE2. Because that is part of the point of wse 2.0. Not only does it embrace the latest WS Specs, but they have added an entire layer of functionality to make this stuff accessible to a lot more developers.

I created a carrot for myself to force myself to do this — which is one of my presentations at ASP.NET Connections: “WSE2.0 for Dummies“. And of course the reward will be that I am going to really do some rockin’ stuff to my clients’ application.

—here is an interesting article I found when trying to sort out where the ws-* stuff fits in with the OASIS standards…old news to many, completely uninteresting to others :-), but info that I saw and set aside for “later“ without really absorbing…well “later” is now…

not that the need them like the rest of us do! <g>

http://weblogs.asp.net/smguest/archive/2004/08/11/213127.aspx

http://www.hutteman.com/weblog/2004/08/11-208.html

I have been using my own little homegrown foxpro 2.6 app for many years to track my time working on client projects. I am now finding too many problems trying to run this 16bit app on my fast computer – and this has made me very inconsistent in keeping good track of my time.

I found a little shareware program that, so far, looks perfect for me. I don’t need anything complex. It’s called Personal Time Clock.  I just enter my clients and projects and then I can start up the clock for one project and when I’m done, enter a memo and then end the time. A little reporting tool prints out the detail report that is similar to what I have been giving my client along with their invoices for many years.

Looks like it’s going to be a great little tool and exactly what I need without a million bells and whistles that I don’t need to get in the way. It can also be used for multiple employees but I haven’t explored those features yet.

I’m sure I’ll be sending them my $25 by the end of the week after I’ve had a chance to use it a bit more.

I seem to make a point of sharing my .NET discoveries with the concept of “heh, if *I* can do this, so can you!” That is the point of why I am doing a WSE2 talk at DevConnections though I am hardly an expert. Michele LePlumber Bustamante is also doing a WSE2 talk at this conference, but she is doing something much deeper. Hopefully hers will be scheduled *after* mine.

My talk will really be for people who think it’s all too scary and wouldn’t even try to use it. The point is that you can at least leverage SOME of WSE2 and make some improvements (especially on the security end) to your apps even if you don’t really understand plumbing or all of that WS-* specification stuff. (“You know like rockets and lasers and stuff” – sorry … family joke).

One thing that I learned from talking with Michele and also asking Don Box at TechEd (I should rephrase that, one of the many things…) was that WSE2 is now easy enough to get yourself into trouble. I.E. you don’t have to be a plumber to implement some of it’s functions, but you’ll need to call a plumber if you have a leak. This is another part of my mission with the talk – to make sure dummies like myself know where they should tread and where they should not and when to call in a pro!

All this talk of plumbing makes me think of this funny item in the Duluth Trading Co. catalog that Rich and I got a good giggle from…

I’m getting a LOT of “virus detected in email” messages this morning. Even a few that NAV said it couldn’t clean and had to quarantine. I updated virus definitions yesterday and have no outstanding windows updates so I can only cross my fingers.

WSE2 service pack1 is on line. This just fixes a bunch of little things that might have been exposed when a lot more people started using it. Also they added additional ws* support. It’s actually quite a long list. Note the known issues before you install and remember not to put it on a box with .NET 2.0 on it!