Brian Ritchie

I have previously written about a solution to the data-binding problem with web service proxies in .NET.  Well, Microsoft has finally heard the community and added support for property generation using the wsdl tool that is part of the WSE3 toolkit.  In fact, they have made this the default mode of operation.  There is a new /fields switch for enabling the old-style of generation.  If you're using the WSE stack, this is a great addition...if not, check out my tool.  Note: The WSE3 is currently a technical preview.

I'm pleased to announce that the XSP web server now supports SSL connections!  XSP is a web server from the Mono Project developed mostly by Gonzalo Paniagua from Novell in C#.  I utilize the XSP code in my Application Server Project to host web applications on Windows and Linux.  I wanted to provide the ability to serve secure pages from within the Application Server without the need for Apache or IIS. Sébastien Pouliot (also from Novell) had already done most of the heavy lifting by developing a SslServerStream.  The majority of the work was to integrate this into the XSP framework.  In the process, I ran across a bug in the SslCipherSuite and submitted a patch to the mono mailing list.  My changes to XSP have recently been committed to the Mono SVN tree.  Another change to XSP is the seperation of the web hosting code into a seperate DLL from the main console application (Mono.WebServer.dll).  This allows others to easily embed the XSP server in their applications.

Here is an example of xsp running with SSL enabled:

> mono xsp.exe --https --cert server.cer --pkfile server.pvk --pkpwd pass --root ~/samples

> makecert -r -eku 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1 -n "CN=server" -sv server.pvk server.cer

February 14th marked the 10th anniversary of the launch of Delphi version 1.0 at the Software Development Conference in California. You can listen to a phone interview with the original creators of Delphi over at the Borland Developers Site to help celebrate.

Living in Jacksonville, it was a great experience to have the Super Bowl in town. The city really stepped up to the challenge of being the smallest city to host the Super Bowl.  Everything, except the traffic, was a great success.

Well, what's old news to some, is new news to others.  I just ran across this component in Scott W.'s blog.  Microsoft has back-ported some of the membership functionality coming out in Whidbey.  This will be a great way to start the migration of 1.1 applications to ASP.NET 2.0 in the future.

Earlier this week, Dr. Vinton Cerf spoke at the University of North Flordia for the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville. It was an excellent lecture on the past and future of the Internet.  Dr. Cerf was involved in the development of TCP and other early internet protocols.  It was great to hear about the early beginnings of the Net from someone who was there!  

#develop, the premiere open source .NET IDE reaches 1.0!  Great work guys!  I only wish it had a web page designer like Web Matrix.

As I was preparing to post this code, I ran across Brad Adams very timely post:
   Nikhil fires up the age old debate again…Data-binding to public fields... yes or no?