Saturday, July 25, 2009

Web Services, Web Services, Web Services....

So have the .NET WCF based Web Services gotten too complicated? I mean they say Web Services, but really they want to say Services. They have Web Servers, Windows Services, Stand Alone services, etc. Services is becoming a generic term to umbrella over any communication service. Hence, Windows Commmunication Services.

I wanted to write a simple Web Service in .NET 4.0 and after fiddling with it for a few minutes, I just gave up. The .NET web.config file are starting to become an art and a skill requiring an explicit mention on the resume. It's a skill in itself to be able to understand the web.config file. To edit it, is another level of skill. One can't just go in a web.config file and change things around. If your projects service didn't get added properly, you don't just go around and try to correct that in the web.config. You hope to delete all service related items and re-add the service.

I added a new service to a project and something wasn't add properly. So, it would not compile. As a result, I removed the service and it left entries in the web.config file. It would still not compile. So I manually deleted all service related nodes. Then the project compiled. Then I added the service again. This time, it would run but wouldn't show me any method on the browse page. It talked about modifying the web.config to allow method display. After a minute, I realized that that is something I don't know.

So while it was easy to write Web Services in 2.0, 3.0 with older compilers, the new WCF based services are something that require some research and reading.

I will spend time reading about the WCF to learn about these. I'll be blogging about those soon.