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.

Comments

Re:Make .NET Open Source

[RiverTonic]

Mono is an open source implementation of .Net Development Framework.
You can find it here

Re:My problem with .NET

[Frostalicious]

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.

SOAP doesn't do much, but watch it scale

[c64cryptoboy]

Then there's SOAP. SOAP allows you to do a lot, but also gives you just enough rope to hang yourself. The W3C guys have generated a very, very primitive transport. You get primitive data types: ints, bools, strings, arrays, arrays of arrays. That's about it. As a result, different implementations of SOAP are not always compatible. For example, there was a problem with datestamps. Some SOAP implementations did them one way, some did them another way.

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.