If there is one guy who can do it, it is sure to be Mr Brains-and-Brawns...

You are a devil, Casey.

This guy is killing me. Another excellent post from him here on how to extact a RSA Public Key from a Signed Assembly.

Nice work, William.

Time and time again, I have heard many companies and people talk about how they want to adopt XML Services and (W3C) SOAP so that they can be seen moving with the times embracing Service Orientated Architectures.

I have always stressed that it is a lot lot more than that. Just because all your applications can emit out SOAP and angle brackets and your consuming applications can "Add Web Reference" doesnt mean your business is in the realms of Service-Orientation.

This article here puts it very nicely. It is a lot more than what most people think and it takes a longer time to understand and embrace it fully. It is very much in the business processes and very importantly, the understanding of it...and this takes a tremendous mindset change in the business thinking and culture.

I took the liberty to quote a few snippets out:

• "Some of the enterprises that are deftly moving toward a service-oriented architecture to exploit the potential of Web services are confronting challenges technology can't always conquer. Users say Web services still suffer from a lack of clear metadata definitions and the need for sometimes significant IT cultural changes. "
   
• "Trimble learned that even using Web services, it isn't possible for the company to "gracefully and quickly" integrate systems gained in several acquisitions over the past couple of years because of the metadata problems, Denis said. "There's too much fluidity around data objects, [and] we fall back into our own nomenclature and begin to define business objects," he said. "Customer definitions are the most complex challenges for us. We support very different businesses. Our customers are major accounts, channels and end users, so it is difficult to have a one-size-fits-all definition." Until industry standards for metadata management mature, the company must tackle the metadata issues outside the SOA project, he said "
   
• "But as the project has moved forward, it has been slowed by the lack of standard metadata definitions, which define and describe applications' data, "
   
• "Learning noted that the migration to Web services required some cultural changes along the way, such as getting customers to change their mind-set about the way they use the system."
   
• "Denis said that the company must create its own process for managing the disparate ERP systems' metadata because of a lack of tools that can automate the operation. The complex ERP network includes packages from SAP AG, Oracle Corp. and Siebel Systems Inc., some of which were gained via acquisitions."
  

Finally, after months of waiting, Microsoft's Enterprise Library is available for download. This is essentially Avanade's famous ACA.NET version 4 which now has a official Microsoft alignment.

Some of the folks in the Spore DotNet Usergroup got together one night to run a practical project. The idea behind the link is to build a bridge to access Visual SourceSafe over the internet. It was built successfully with the help of SCCBridge.

Incidentally, SCCBridge relies heavily on SOAP and DIME for its purpose and it is therefore no surprise that Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 was heavily involved in use here.

"Both the server and the client are written in C# in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. In the project is used library SharpZipLib created by Mike Krueger (for more info see http://www.icsharpcode.net/ ). The algorithm for text files comparing was taken from The Code Porject site, and was written by Shankar Pratap."

This has been floating around for some time BUT MSFT Corp has released an official statement here

Since XQuery is expected to reach W3C recommendation only in 2006, it won't be shipped in the upcoming .NET Framework 2.0

I guess people like me will have to live with XSLT and XPATH for now.

Finally, this is done. Read the cover story here.

Even though I usually dont advocate the use of SOAP to transfer large BLOBS of binary bits (I tend to think that there are slightly better ways of transferring files and/or attachments), I do believe that there will be more and more calls for uses for it and that is why I think this is an important specification which is way better than W3C's SwA or MSFT Corp's/IETF's  DIME (Can you say Security ?). The latter, incidentally, is being implemented by Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 1 and 2.

Of course, since DIME is being superseded by MTOM, I am really looking forward (hopefully) to the implementations of it in WSE 3.0

Got this inkling feeling that these ASCII Character code tables will come in handy one day...

DEC	HEX	ASCII		KEY		DEC	HEX	ASCII
0	00	NUL	Null	CTRL-@		32	20	SPACE
1	01	SOH	Start of header	CTRL-A		33	21	!
2	02	STX	Start of text	CTRL-B		34	22	"
3	03	ETX	End of text	CTRL-C		35	23	#
4	04	EOT	End of transmission	CTRL-D		36	24	$
5	05	ENQ	Enquiry	CTRL-E		37	25	%
6	06	ACK	Acknowledge	CTRL-F		38	26	&
7	07	BEL	Bell	CTRL-G		39	27	'
8	08	BS	Backspace	CTRL-H		40	28	(
9	09	HT	Horizontal tab	CTRL-I		41	29	)
10	0A	LF	Line Feed	CTRL-J		42	2A	*
11	0B	VT	Vertical tab	CTRL-K		43	2B	+
12	0C	FF	Form feed	CTRL-L		44	2C	,
13	0D	CR	Carriage return	CTRL-M		45	2D	-
14	0E	SO	Shift out	CTRL-N		46	2E	.
15	0F	SI	Shift in	CTRL-O		47	2F	/
16	10	DLE	Data link escape	CTRL-P		48	30	0
17	11	XON, DC1	XON, Device control 1	CTRL-Q		49	31	1
18	12	DC2	Device control 2	CTRL-R		50	32	2
19	13	XOFF, DC3	XOFF, Device control 3	CTRL-S		51	33	3
20	14	DC4	Device control 4	CTRL-T		52	34	4
21	15	NAK	Negative acknowledge	CTRL-U		53	35	5
22	16	SYN	Synchronous idle	CTRL-V		54	36	6
23	17