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San Mehat On Web Services & .Net
A reader writes: "There's an interview with San Mehat in regards to .Net & Webservices. He has some interesting comments about what will work and what won't work, and where things are going." San is well known for his Netwinder work, as well as being a good DJ. And, in the interest of full disclosure, San does work for VA Software, the parent company of OSDN, as is DevChannel.
I think it would benefit Microsoft if they made the framework for .NET open source. The dedication and expertise of the Open Source developer community would greatly enhance the reputation of .NET, leading to wider global deployment.
.NET isn't that bad and VS.NET isn't that bad. That being said...I'd rather not use VS.NET. I've never been comfortable with it to be honest. ASP.NET has made my web stuff so much easier it isn't even funny. I used to be doing PHP stuff and then tried ASP 3.0. I never really liked either of them...I'm kind of excited to see where this stuff goes. And as for the post on VS.NET being buggy...it's not.
Thats not been my experience. Its far more stable than its predecessor for me with C++ and C#, esp as the workspace gets bigger.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
You could use notepad and the .NET framework SDK no problem. And I would give VS.NET 2003 a shot. It's only like twenty bucks if you own VS.NET 2002, and it performs much better.
That being said, I've been working with VS.NET 2002 since beta 2 and have never seen it throw an exception at me. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've got some faulty hardware or you've hosed your IIS settings (very easy to do).
And I can't believe you mention hating a crappy IDE, and loving Java in the same breath. Java has had the worst collection of IDEs EVER. Notepad and command line was the only way to be productive.
Do you mean alternatives like CORBA, or like REST? REST to me seems the proper way to go about web services for 99% of web services people are building. Most people are doing simple calls... the only trick that remains (and is evidenced in the interview) is a simple means of creating objects that represent web service calls and results, to make working with the calls more natural in the OO language that most corporations are using right now. I'm hoping a simple mapping layer on top of a pull parse is a good answer - I'm trying out JiBX for that although it's still rather beta.
In theory with a good mapper to and from the XML should alleviate the collection problem they talked about in the article by naturally generating good XML for Maps and Lists, and converting back just as easily.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But at the same time it's not so easy to pass a serialized type from one system to another without rolling your own solution. Int and String will have no problem but what happens when you try to pass a custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in .net to a j2ee system.
I agree with what he said about it not being spec'd out but I also agree with you in saying it should be left out of the SOAP specs. I think that 3rd party software similiar to Borland's Janeva will come into play when interoperating between two different systems. But a few more complex types in SOAP would be nice.
But, we live in a world where STL is a normal thing. If you're a C++ or Java programmer or any kind of an object-oriented programmer, you must have some semblance of containers
I don't think .net has generics yet.
The questions: Mono is the .net runtime/compiler/interpreter for C# (yet). But what about the proprietary code ? the windows forms etc ? All the .net apps that have a MS-based gui will not be allowed to run in mono. Will they ? And how will mono handle those Win32 calls ? Maybe through wine ?
I've always found that SOAP had all the markings of a specification developed by a committee that want to make sure that everything made it in to the first draft. Personally, I prefer XML RPC : http://www.xmlrpc.com/
Jason.
It's good to hear that some people in this discussion really like Visual Studio .NET. Not everybody though!
I work in the VS.NET team and we are VERY interested in hearing your feedback, good and bad - particularly on the latest VS.NET 2003.
What features do you most like and what do you most dislike? Bothered by any bugs? I can check to see if they have already been fixed in the current builds of the version under development, if you can send me sufficient information to reproduce them myself.
My responsibilities include parts of the user interface and the VB/C# project and build system, but I'm interested in any feedback - I'll pass it on to the right people and I will make sure it is taken seriously. My email is danmose@microsoft.removethis.com ...