<ChristophDotNet

Web services are making their ways into the enterprise. Yet, Web service technology is continuing its evolution into a mature, full-fledged platform for feature-rich and secure enterprise applications.

 

This talk presents two second-generation development frameworks: Web services enhancements (WSE) and the Integration Bridge Framework (IBF). WSE adds a number of improvements over the Web services support built into the .NET Framework namely:

·  Support for the WS-Security family of specifications

·  light-weight Web services without requiring the IIS web serve

·  Improved support for message-oriented message exchange patterns

·  A declarative, policy driven programming model based on WS-Policy

 

IBF is an application framework to enhance productivity of information workers by integrating Web services directly into Microsoft Office 2003 documents, such as Word documents or emails displayed in Outlook. Bringing data from other applications directly into office documents eliminates the need of switching between different applications offers and thus streamlines business processes.

 

Together the two frameworks deliver a secure platform for effective and secure productivity solutions. The talk examines the need for security in a Web services environment and introduces the capabilities of WSE and IBF 

 

I got brave/curious/stupid/desperate after getting BizTalk to call an RPC/encoded Web service again and installed the .NET runtime distributed with the October CTP to see if that would be an option to have VS 2005 and BizTalk 2004 on the same box.

 

The answer is:
NOPE!!!

 

Now BizTalk is hanging again when processing an RPC/encoded response from a web service. I surely hope that the .NET Runtime team and the BizTalk team get together before Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 and hash this one out.

 

The whole side-by-side concept would be really great if the entire world was running .NET. Since even Microsoft's own applications don't seem to be able to get it right, how should 3rd party developers be able to do that? The sad reality is: The world is full of legacy applications that are not ready for side-by-side installations of the framework. Quit pretending it is!

I finally returned to that box with BTS 2004 and Whidbey Beta 1 I mentioned earlier. 

I wanted to do some work on another project -one that didn't interact with RPC encoded web

services. This time I ran into another problem. I kept getting a COM error STG_E_FILENOTFOUND whenever I ran the Web Service Deployment Wizard.

 

I ran FileMon to find out what file caused the error and noticed that the wizard was loading all sorts of Visual Studio 2005 libraries. The wizard is driving Visual Studio through its automation interfaces and Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 use the same ProgIDs. I smell the scent of the days without side-by-side. So I uninstalled my precious .NET 2.0 Beta 1 and SQL 2005 Beta 2 from that box.

 

The good news is:

1) calls to RPC encoded web services no longer hang waiting for the response.

2) The COM error running the Web Service Deploying wizard is gone, too.

 

The bad news is:

 

Now it get a different exception running the wizard right when if is supposed to complete:

 

I am getting:

 

Failed to create project "http://localhost/Process_Proxy".
[System.IO.FileNotFoundException] The system cannot find the file specified.

 

or

 

Failed to create project "http://localhost/Process_Proxy".
[System.IO.FileNotFoundException] The item 'Service1.asmx' does not exist in the project directory. It may have been moved, renamed or deleted.

 

In both cases, I do see the new virtual directory in IIS with the following files in it:

 

Process.csproj

Process.csproj.webinfo

Service1.asmx

 

When I open Process.csproj in Visual Studio, I don't get an error, but the project is empty, i.e. Service1.asmx is not part of the project.

 

I ran repair for Visual Studio 2003 and BizTalk and re-installed SQL Server (because uninstalling SQL 2005 corrupted SQLDMO -- yes … I get it, COM doesn't do side-by-side well), but I can't get id of the error.

 

I enabled tracing in the BTSWebSvcWiz.exe.config file by setting the trace switch:

 

  <system.diagnostics>
    <switches>
      <!-- TraceLevel 0=Off, 1=Error, 2=Warning, 3=Info, 4=Verbose -->
      <add name="ApplicationTraceSwitch" value="4" />
    </switches>
    <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="4">
      <listeners>
        <add name="Trace"
          type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener, System, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"
          initializeData="BTSWebSvcWiz.trace.log" />
      </listeners>
    </trace>
  </system.diagnostics>

 

But unfortunately, the generated log file doesn't contain any more information than the UI of the wizard.

 

I looked through the IIS logs and found that last file the wizard requests is get_aspx_ver.aspx and IIS returns a file not found 404 error:

 

20:07:09 127.0.0.1 GET /Process_Proxy/get_aspx_ver.aspx 404
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 GET /Process_Proxy/vs-136057519329675525_tmp.htm 200
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 GET /_vti_inf.html 200
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 POST /Process_Proxy/_vti_bin/shtml.dll/_vti_rpc 405
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 GET /_vti_inf.html 200
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 POST /_vti_bin/shtml.dll 200
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 POST /_vti_bin/shtml.dll 200
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 POST /_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll 200
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 POST /_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll 200
20:07:09 127.0.0.1 POST /_vti_bin/_vti_adm/admin.dll 200
20:07:11 127.0.0.1 POST /_vti_bin/_vti_adm/admin.dll 200
20:07:11 127.0.0.1 POST /Process_Proxy/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll 200
20:07:11 127.0.0.1 POST /Process_Proxy/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll 200
20:07:11 127.0.0.1 POST /Process_Proxy/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll 200
20:07:11 127.0.0.1 GET /Process_Proxy/vs-134074747329675525_tmp.htm 200
20:07:11 127.0.0.1 POST /Process_Proxy/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll 200
20:07:11 127.0.0.1 GET /Process_Proxy/get_aspx_ver.aspx 404

 

Unfortunately, requesting this file seems to be normal behavior for Visual Studio and I don't understand why the Web Service Deployment Wizard is not able to handle this properly. I also ran aspnet_regiis /r to see if that would get rid if the problem to no avail.

 

 

Has anybody else run into that problem and successfully solved it?