I've just managed to get the .NET 3.5 style of WCF Web Programming Model services to work inside an EPiServer 5 R2 site on IIS 7 and Windows 2008.  I had a few difficulties finding out how to integrate the new model into IIS/ASP.NET and then further problems getting it working in EPiServer.  Here, I outline the solution. Context I'm currently designing a site that will be using the Akamai Edge Suite of technologies (www.akamai.com) and so I desire that all client access is through the caching layer.  Additionally, I'm motivated towards a REST model for web services to support a greater degre... [More]

Since yesterday, and my post about Google Chrome, Google has updated its terms and conditions and removed the clauses.  See my previous post here: Security: How much do you trust Google?. Privacy clauses Section 11 has been completed rewritten.  Note that this is the only change in the terms of service, even the date has not been changed: 11. Content license from you 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. Looks a bit different to the previous clause.  Specifically, the following has be... [More]

Google has just released a beta of its Google Chrome web browser.  Make sure you read the terms and conditions.  Have a look at the privacy clauses... [Note: Google has updated its terms and conditions.  Read my blog post here: Security: Google retracts its privacy clauses] Privacy clauses 11. Content license from you 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive li... [More]

I'm currently conducting a due-diligence review of a technical system.  The system is a classic distributed, two-tier system with data held centrally and business-logic delegated to an application tier.  I've been asked to perform a security analysis as part of my review.  I can't tell you anything about the project itself, for confidentiality (and security) reasons, but I thought I'd share some of the thought processes behind what I've been doing. Reviewing security The foremost rule of security assessment is to include the entire system.  Don't just look at technical aspects of security bu... [More]

A colleague has been asking how to do this and I've found a great post written years ago.  I've linked it here: XPath & Namespaces (Wayne Allen's Blog)  Versions Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Metadata Categories: Software Development, .NET, XPath Additional keywords: namespace manager Technorati Tags: .NET, software development, XML, default namespace, XML namespace, XPath

I've compiled a list of the Technorati tags that I use on this site: http://blogs.interakting.co.uk/steve/archive/2008/05/22/Blogging-Technorati-tags.aspx  Hope someone finds it useful. Metadata Categories: blogging, tags Technorati tags: blogging

This is just a quick addendum to a colleague's post about using JSON in .NET. Original post See Dan's post here: Google Translate and .NET (Dan Matthews) Complete example code This example translates the phrase "a piece of pie" into French using Google Translate.  I do not use any processing on the JSON output except to convert it into an XML document that can be processed in .NET: using System; using System.Net; using System.Web; using System.IO; using System.Xml; using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json; namespace JSON_Example { class Program { static void M... [More]

Have you ever wanted to change the default namespace of an XmlDocument in .NET.  It's not as easy as it might be. The problem Sometimes, particularly in middleware systems, you need to pass a source document to a target system.  The document may not need any changes, but one system will apply namespace declarations in the document and the other won't work with them, or one won't add them and the other will require them. There are a few main approaches you can take: XSL Transforms Regular expression replacements (or other string manipulations) XmlNode traversal methods (DO... [More]

I'm currently reading "Enterprise Architecture as Strategy" by Jeanne W. Ross, et al., published by Harvard Business School Press.  I recommend that you obtain a copy and read it if you are interested or involved in enterprise architecture or business IT strategy. Read more online You can find out more about the book and the ideas it contains here: http://architectureasstrategy.com/book/eas/. Reference Enterprise Architecture as Strategy Creating a Foundation for Business Execution Ross, Weill, Robertson, Harvard Business School Press, 2006 ... [More]

Today I've been talking to some of our developers about generics in C#.  As part of it, we worked through an example, the Badger Example, which I've reproduced here for those intrigued! Overview This document demonstrates the creation of a generic class called Badger. Its purpose is entirely educational and introduces the use of type parameter constraints. The Initial Badger Class class Badger<TBadgerCharacter> { TBadgerCharacter _character; public Badger(TBadgerCharacter character) { // TODO: Use the new operator _character = character; }... [More]

I've been looking at the C# specification for the new keyword when used on a class member declaration and thought I'd share my findings.  If you are a die-hard C# coder then you won't find anything new here, but of course that doesn't mean that you already know it!  Maybe it would be better to check... The basics Encapsulation Encapsulation is a term used in object-oriented design.  It describes the idea of wrapping some functionality in an outer shell.  The outer shell may contain significant functionality or it may just adapt the behaviour of the contained code. Further, encapsulation pr... [More]

Have you ever wanted to remove a handler from an event, but haven't had a reference to the object receiving the event, or perhaps you don't even know what type the object has!  .NET hides the details of events but with a bit of help from the Reflection classes, you can edit the handlers for your own purposes. Cautionary note In general, this is a really, really, really bad thing to do! I'm writing about it partly because it is educational, and partly because it was an interesting problem to solve. Behind the scenes of .NET events I'm going to be using C# throughout this post, but the comme... [More]

Overview I was recently asked why some expressions didn't seem to be doing what the developer intended.  Typically, this was due to the use of the short or byte data types.  This post is a brief discussion on the related parts of the C# Language Specification (version 3.0). Reference You can find the C# Language Specification here: Download it here: C# Language Specification 3.0 (MSDN) Note that page references in this post may vary slightly from your view of the document due to printable page size differences on your computer. Introducing literals (pages 40-45 of the specific... [More]

Overview I'm in the process of writing a Visual Studio template extension to automate the creation of Windows Communication Foundation components.  As part of the Wizard, I want to allow users to configure options based on various enumerations.  To help with this, I've developed a generic control that extends a ComboBox to manage a set of allowed values automatically.  This way, the same code can be used with any .NET enumeration type. I've coded it as a generic type but it would be just as easy to use a runtime-provided type for the functionality.  Indeed, it already uses Reflection to chec... [More]

Overview Following my earlier post about WCF service design guidelines, I've created some WCF code snippets to simplify the implementation of services, operations, messages and data contracts. Resources Download the snippet here: wcf-services.snippet (note that you will need to save the file with the .snippet extension; I've had to rename the extension for this server)  Content I've included the full content here, partly to support searches: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet"> ... [More]

Overview Some of you might have recognised that we are using a customised version of the SubText blogging engine for these blogs.  Recently, I've made some changes to support additional feeds and I thought I'd share them with you. Goals We wanted to support context-specific feeds throughout the blog site.  Since we host multiple blogs in the same site, this meant that we had the following requirements: Enable access to the aggregated RSS feed throughout the site Enable access to the main blog feed in both Atom and Rss formats Enable access to category, day and month feeds... [More]

Overview Microsoft has released an article comparing the performance of WCF and .NET 2.0 distributed application technologies such as ASMX web services, WSE web services, COM+ applications and .NET 2.0 remoting.  The results are surprising. Detail You can find the article here: A Performance Comparison of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) with Existing Distributed Communication Technologies (Saurabh Gupta, MSDN, February 2007) Comment The main findings from my perspective are as follows: There really isn't a good case to use ASMX or WSE in preference to WCF in new pr... [More]

Overview I'm currently writing a service that needs to provide long-lived callback behaviour to a large number of clients.  In this case, the WCF session semantics are not appropriate and so I can't use the ServiceContractAttribute's CallbackContract property. Why not sessions? In my scenario, WCF sessions are unwarranted because: WCF sessions correlate a group of messages, however I only want to group a single pair WCF sessions provide ordered delivery, however this is not needed WCFsessions are explicitly initiated and terminated by the calling application ... [More]

Overview The content of this post was written in response to a query by a colleague wanting to reclaim memory used by a .NET component used as part of a legacy application.  Concerns were also raised about memory leaks in .NET.  In this post I describe some of the basics of .NET and COM memory management, and how to explicitly manage .NET component memory use. Reference counting To understand memory management in .NET versus in COM, you first need to understand reference counting. In a COM application, each time an object is accessed the client informs the object that it is using another r... [More]

Overview Microsoft have released significant parts of the .NET framework source code for developers using Visual Studio 2008.  In case you've not been following the releases, this blog post includes links to configuration and hotfix resources. Hotfix Before you attempt to configure the source code, make sure you have the following patch installed: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10443&wa=wsignin1.0 Configuration I'll not attempt to reproduce perfectly good instructions, so here's a link: Shawn Burke's Blog: Configur... [More]