I write about programming, Git and the craft of building software. Not often, but when I have something worth saying.
The Christmas holidays usually mean taking a break from the usual everyday routine and focus more on the important relationships in our lives, like family and close friends. To me, this also somehow includes having the time to think about things technology-wise that either are new or haven’t crossed my mind in a long time.
I am currently in the middle of a project where we are migrating a (large) amount of web services built on top of ASP.NET in .NET 2.0 (commonly referred to as ASMX Web Services) over to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) platform available in .NET 3.0. The primary reason we want to do that, is because we would like to take advantage of the binary message serialization support available in WCF to speed up communication between the services and their clients. This same technique was possible in earlier versions of the .NET Framework thanks to a technology called Remoting, which is now superceded by WCF. In both cases it requires that both the client and server run on .NET in order to work. But I digress.
If you have followed the latest advancements in the technologies and standards around web services, you must have come across the term “REST” at least more than once. In rough terms REST is a way of building web services by relying exclusively on the infrastructure of the World Wide Web to define operations and exchange messages. This is an alternative to “traditional” web services, which instead use a set of standardized XML dialects, WSDL and SOAP to achieve the same goals. The reason I’m writing about REST is that if you, like me, have prematurely judged it as some kind of toy technology, you are in for a real eye-opener!
When discussing web development, the subject of security inevitably comes up. Last week while I was teaching a class in ASP.NET, we had a sample login page that, although being quite trivial in nature, was exposing a serious vulnerability to SQL injections attacks.
On the second day of PDC 2008 in Los Angeles Microsoft gave the first public preview of the next version of their client operating system code-named Windows 7.
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