Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax)

Syndication support was one of the nice features introduced in the latest WCF drop (3.5).  At first glance, I can say the APIs are great, allowing you to write a syndication feed in matter of minutes without worrying much of some underline implementation details pertinent to RSS or ATOM.

A web application used by a great number of users calls a Web service by sending messages across a network, sometimes through one or more intermediaries. The web service needs to identify the user logged in the web application somehow to update data or initiate a business processes. Some of the data within the messages is considered to be sensitive in nature so it need to be protected.

One of the blog's readers from Italy, Fabio Cozzolino has written a interesting host for WCF that gets and merges configuration from different configuration files. You can download the code from his post, which is completely in Italian. (Anyway, the code is not, it is English).

Many times the services are just part of a service layer interface or facade that only delegate calls to other components in lower layers, such as entity translators, business logic components, data access components or service agents that work as proxy with other systems. To clarify more this point, this is how the Patterns & Practices team envisioned  a general multi-layer architecture for .NET applications, http://blogs.msdn.com/donsmith/archive/2006/07/21/673481.aspx

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been very busy lately working with Daniel, Mariano and other guys here in Clarius on an open-source implementation of Simple Sharing Extensions for .NET. The architecture of the project is still evolving, many changes have been introduced since the the first release, and it will continue this way as long as we find things to improve or new features are added. For this reason is that your feedback is quite important for us at this point.

Since the Gotdot.net site disappeared along with the code of this implementation, my friend Jason Hogg has kindly published the code on his blog.

Microsoft has released the first CTP of the synchronization framework, it is available to download here.

A common problem in WCF that many people face is the impossibility of loading the client configuration from different configuration files. This is a common scenario  when the developer wants to deploy some binaries with along with an independent configuration file (Which may be in a resource file also) to avoid modifying the main configuration file. A weeks ago, I described a easy workaround to use the external configuration files through the use of the configSource attribute (A mechanism provided by .NET). However, that approach requires several configuration files to configure an entire WCF channel, at least three files (client section, bindings and behaviors).