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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.
Every time I build it's basically 50/50 whether or not the compiler is going to start throwing spurrious exceptions.
You must have a corrupt install. I've been working professionally with VB.Net for about 2 years now and have never had a compile go bad, except when it was my fault.
The rest of the IDE, on the other hand, is about as stable as a crack ho. My favorite is when it opens up project files for me automatically and randomly, just because it decided to. Source safe integration is also a joke.
.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.
If he shows up at my company, I think I'll make sure my resume is up to date, just for good luck...
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
SOAP has several parts and he seems to be confusing them. Most all of the major vendors are using Schema (another W3 standard) for types and SOAP for enveloping but not encoding.
.Net does not use it by default but rather uses SOAP enveloping with Literal encoding.
SOAP encoding is recognized as incompatible and limiting which is why
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.
While Mr. Mehat states this as a criticism, I going to come out saying that this is a strength. SOAP is very light weight considering its alternatives. In-so-far as you can serialize objects to W3C Schema primitive types, you can avoid the difficulties of complex marshaling one incurs with other distribute service mechanisms (the stubs/skeletons of CORBA, etc.). The W3C Schema types are a quick and easy standard that are independent of choice of language, operating system, environment, etc.
I put the 'fun' in fundamentalism
why does his DJ description read like marketing-speak?
;)
San's years of DJing experience playing parties and clubs from California to Canada have put him close in touch with the dancefloor and its needs.
Java has had the worst collection of IDEs EVER
No it doesnt. I'm on a C# project at the moment but I'm gagging to get back to Java and IDEA. IntelliJ is an absolute pleasure to code with.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
What do you mean by not that special?
It isn't supposed to be special, it's just supposed to be easier than writing custom HTTP parsers.
As for not being worth it, I guess I'm curious what you suggest as an alternative?
my favorite thing he says is "SOAP allows you to do a lot, but also gives you just enough rope to hang yourself." must be soap on a rope.
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
-1, uninformed flamebait
Name a Microsoft product that has the refactoring features of the Eclipse IDE, or IntelliJ.
Notepad and command line was the only way to be productive.
-1, uninformed flamebait
Even in the early days of Java development, only a mor^H^Hasochist would use Notepad to write Java code when several free syntax-highlighting auto-indenting text editors were available.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
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 can't really name an MS product that does refactoring, just like you didn't name a Sun IDE. But if you are looking for some .NET refactoring tools I'd recommend checking out C# Refactory. Also Microsoft has a nice tool called FxCop that keeps you within the Design Guidelines of .NET
As for my notepad comment, the difference between using a textpad vs notepad is almost a moot point. That's not and IDE, that's a text editor. Hmmm, perhaps I use notepad like most people use "kleenex."
No offense why are you working with vb.net?
Don't underestimate the power of the dark side. Put another way, when the suits say the whole team will use VB.Net, and when you are not independently wealthy, that's what you use.
Anyways, after using various incarnations of VB for about 7 years, I don't really mind it anymore. I started as a C++ programmer and thought VB was crap. These days, don't care. Quality of source code depends much more on the quality of the programmer than on the quality of the language. It's the man, not the machine I guess.
And also... My fellow Java developer and myself have had zero problems exchanging complex types over web services. There is no problem with XML/SOAP. The problem lies in immature proxy generators. WebSphere Studio Application Developer and the
Ya, but it still sucks. :)
I'm primarily a Java developer, but I'm on a VB.NET project right now. I did some VB 6 work a few years ago, so I've got some basic VB background. I think I'd be pretty pissed off if I was a serious VB developer who started moving into the .NET world. With .NET, VB is a whole new language. There's little that even resembles early VB. Which is funny, because I've read MS marketing material that brags about how "with .NET you don't need to learn a new language" (intended to be a stab at the fact that J2EE is language-centric). But VB.NET looks more like Java than it looks like VB 6.
Anyway, .NET isn't bad, and VS.NET is a relatively decent IDE -- though I do have a few compaints about it. But I'll be happy to get back to writing Java. And as impressive as some aspects of VS.NET are, it's no comparison to Eclipse.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
San Mehat is an anagram of Neat Sham.
in my experience... if you wanna pass more complex datastructures over webservices, you send objects encoded as xml strings... then decode the xml into the native structures you want.
.NET services already in place. the hardest stuff i've had to tackle in the interoperability between java and .NET is getting into the soap headers... and then just getting commonality between encryption classes etc. lot's of hurdles and non-overlapping block styles and things. drive me crazy!
sure, it's work, but so it goes.
that's how we've gotten around a lack of standardization of higher level objects.
i've been writing a set of java services to serve as a linux option to some
gosh, and then how some of those wsdl and stub generator tools in java land have changed and produce different code. shoot me now!
m.
Web services is just supposed to be easier, and nothing more. There is no extra functionality or whatsoever. But my point is that Microsoft and others are just blowing it up.
Last time I saw such a guy from Microsoft that gave a presentation about the new technology and it was like web-services were going to change our way of booking flight tickets combined hotel rooms and a rent-a-car, ... And it's just a technology that simplifies the interconnection between companies services. Programmers will still need to make the connection between different companies.
This is RiverTonic's sig.
.NET is not intrisically any more locked in than Java is, although that may change. In any case, it's not relevent in any way to a discussion of IDEs and tools, since third parties are more than happy to make them whether or not they can create thier own VM/runtime/what have you. And if you thought for more than half a second instead of feeling threatened by .NET (if it sucks so bad, why do you care about it?), you'd realize that.
Yep, the framework uses about 20mb of memory. But it's one time hit and not per application. Not going to be much of an issue soon since explorer.exe is being re-written using the framework. (That means that 20mb is going to be used whether you run any other framework apps or not).
And really, I'm not sure that a 20mb baseline would stop the adoption of a peice of software. *shrug*
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 ...