WS DevCon: Yasser Shohoud: The Right Way to Build Web services

Yesser delivered a clear message, true for anyone building component-oriented software ? nail the interfaces first, then think about internal component design. In Web Services world this practice is also applicable. One should start with WSDL first. Then design service internals using classes and data structures. Point taken.

There?s little support in ?developer tools? for this kind of workflow, so Yesser have called upon the audience to write their congressman and demand better ?tools?.  By ?tools? Yasser really meant VS.NET and seemed to brush off the reminders from the audience that there are in fact other developer tools that do support WSDL-first workflow. Being firmly in VS.NET camp, I nevertheless wasn?t impressed with the way Yasser made VS.NET the center of the world of dev tools.

 

WS DevCon: David Seidel & Mark Ericson:  Web Services Diagnostics

David and Mark gave some good tips of how to ease debugging web services.

Some of the tips:

-          Use HTTP headers to transport logging messages

-          Always compare cashed WSDL with the original to make sure that the other end is still using the same definition

They also gave a demo of SOAPscope (looks like very interesting product). Contrasting with the previous speaker, they gave generous information about other diagnostic tools out there, including their direct competitors.

Some of the tools I?ve noted: proxyTrace, xmldiff

 

WS DevCon: Andres Aguiar : DeKlarit Demo

DeKlarit seems like a truly useful product, especially for people who are can start an application with a brand new database schema (as oppose to build an application on top of existing database). The design of the product and the way it integrates in VS.NET is very well done as well. Detailed product review by Chris is here.