Entries tagged with web services - Channel 9

Apache Stonehenge demoed at PDC09

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:47:00 GMT

A couple weeks ago, Microsoft was at ApacheCon. We reported the progress made on the Stonehenge project and presented the roadmap.

The goal of Stonehenge is to provide a public forum to test the interoperability of WS-* protocols on different vendor stacks and to build sample applications that could provide best practices and coding guidelines for better interoperability. The main sample application, StockTrader has been implemented on .NET (by Microsoft), PHP (by WSO2), WSAS JAVA stack (by WSO2), Metro (by SUN Microsystems), Spring (by SpringSource). The latest version of StockTrader uses the WS-Security and WS-Trust protocols for claims-based authentication scenarios. This allows the end-users to be authenticated through an independent Security Token Service (STS) that is trusted by the bank and to pass that token to the broker to process the transaction.

This week at PDC09, we were demoing the project. I went to see Kent Brown, product manager for WCF and asked him to give us an update and show a demo of the different StockTrader applications working together.

Watch the video till the end, Kent unveils the mystery on why the project was called Stonehenge!

Additional links:

Project page: Apache Stonehenge
Interoperability Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/

Native Web Services, Part 2 - Build a WWSAPI Web Service

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:12:00 GMT

With the Windows Web Services API (WWSAPI), you can connect your C/C++ client applications with web services. You can also create C/C++ server-side web service end-points. WWSAPI is new with Windows 7 (client) and Windows Server 2008 R2 (server). WWSAPI is also back-ported to all formally supported versions of Windows (client and server). The WWSAPI runtime library (WebServices.dll) is a native-code implementation of WS-* family of protocols for SOAP based web services.

WWSAPI enables several solution scenarios and benefits including:

1. Implement web services in native C/C++ code on both Windows client and server. C/C++ application developers have often requested this platform technology capability but were previously forced to write their own or interface their native-code solutions with managed-code wrappers.

2. Achieve interoperability with web services implemented using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), ASP.NET XML Web Services, and even services implemented using non-Microsoft implementations of WS-* libraries.

3. Construct web services with minimal service startup time and minimal process working-set dependencies.

4. Use web services implementations in resource-constrained deployment environments.

5. Avoid native-management interop scenarios with potentially costly marshalling side-effects.

This is part 2 of a 2 episode series and focuses upon using WWSAPI to construct a web service. The example illustrates adding a web-service interface to a native (presumably legacy) application. The demonstration provides a comparison between using a managed (WCF) interface and a native (WWSAPI) interface involving sorting algorthms with differing interop costs.

Find sample code and additional technical details at MSDN Code Gallery.

See part 1 of this series here.

Native Web Services, Part 1 - Build a WWSAPI Client

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:11:00 GMT

WWSAPI enables several solution scenarios and benefits including:

3. Construct web services with minimal service startup time and minimal process working-set dependencies.

4. Use web services implementations in resource-constrained deployment environments.

5. Avoid native-management interop scenarios with potentially costly marshalling side-effects.

This is part 1 of a 2 episode series and focuses upon using WWSAPI from a client application. The example illustrates a client application using WWSAPI to interact with a "Sort Service".

Find sample code and additional technical details at MSDN Code Gallery.

See part 2 of this series here.

ARCast.TV - Implementing a Hybrid Architecture Based on SOA and ROA in the Enterprise

Bob Familiar — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:56:00 GMT

In this interview, Kevin Israel, Visual Studio Team System MVP, shares with Zhiming Xue his thoughts on implementation of a hybrid architecture based on SOA and ROA in the enterprise space. Kevin explains what Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) is and, through examples, highlights its key differences from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). He argues that while the two architectural patterns share the same common problem domains such as versioning and application manageability, they work differently in practice. ROA services or RESTful services may be used to bring resources to the user, whereas SOA services are typically created to process business logic. Therefore, the crux of the hybrid architecture implementation is to use them together and use them for their intended purposes. Kevin believes that as cloud computing and enterprise meshup applications start to emerge, more applications based on the hybrid architecture of SOA and ROA may be seen in the enterprise.

Dynamics Duo: Composition with Third-Party Web Services

Ben Riga — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:41:00 GMT

In this episode we talk about a variety of topics including using Silverlight for UI, composing using 3rd party web services and storing complex information in Dynamics CRM.

We spend most of our time on the flight booking page. This page was built using Silverlight to demonstrate some of the simple experiences that can be designed. In this case the UI was built in Expression Blend. Designers and developers work together closely on projects. In fact, developers and designers work on the exact same project files but stay in their own environments; Developers stay in Visual Studio, Designers stay in Expression. We’ll talk a lot more time about Silverlight in the final episode of this series tomorrow.

In our example we use a third party web service run by ezGDS to present the conference attendee with a list of flight options. ezGDS takes care behind the scenes to retrieve that flight fare information from various global distribution systems including Amadeus, Worldspan, Sabre and others. The attendee sees none of that complexity since we’ve built all of that directly into our system. Even though the information coming back can be very complex, including ticket information and various inbound and outbound flight segments, Dynamics CRM easily handles storing this information in a custom entity.

This episode is part of a 5-part series. In this series we’ve tried to explain how you can combine the Microsoft Web Platform with Dynamics CRM to quickly build and deploy self-service solutions. The full set of videos include:

Both Girish and I enjoyed recording this series. We hope you enjoyed them as well. If you have comments or suggestions for other topics, feel free to add comments below or email Girish or me (Ben) directly.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 AIF Web Services Screencast

Sanjay Jain — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:51:00 GMT

Application Integration Framework (AIF) enables companies to integrate Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 and communicate with external business processes and partners through the exchange of XML over various transport media. AIF enables both business-to-business and application-to-application integration scenarios.

Following enhancements are new in AX 2009
* Create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations are now supported.
* The programming model for AIF supports document services that encapsulate business logic and are the interface to external systems.
* AIF provides functionality for consuming external Web services from within X++.
* Performance improvements include the ability to scale up and handle more messages through parallel message processing and the addition of multiple AOSs.
* New document services for additional commonly-used documents.

Additional Resources:
* Microsoft Releases Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, June, 2008
* AIF Overview
* What's New in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 for Developers
* WCF and AIF in Dynamics 2009: Chatting with Michael Merz, PM for AIF (Video Interview by Ben Riga)
* Microsoft Dynamics AX receives placement in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
* Download Pre-Sales Demonstration Toolkit For Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 - Refresh 1 (Need PartnerSource Access)

Sanjay Jain
ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
Blog: http://Blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SanjayJain369

SharePoint for Developers Part 6 - Custom web services

Kirk Evans — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:04:00 GMT

Kirk Evans shows how to create a custom ASMX web service hosted in SharePoint that enables query, insert, and delete of specific lists in a SharePoint site. You will also see how to use the WCFTestClient utility to call the web services. For more information, visit the accompanying blog post on Kirk's MSDN blog.

SharePoint for Developers Part 4 - Calling SharePoint Web Services from Silverlight

Kirk Evans — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:46:00 GMT

In this session, Kirk Evans will demonstrate how to call SharePoint's web services from a Silverlight client. We will use SharePoint's Lists web service, and will show how to use databinding in Silverlight to display results from a SharePoint list. We will also see how to get around cross domain issues using SharePoint Designer 2007. The accompanying post with code listings is available on Kirk’s MSDN blog.

WCF 3.5 RESTful web service

ashishjaiman — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:56:00 GMT

REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. in thsi screencast i will talk about Rest, RESTFul web services and how easy it is to create Restful services using .NET3.5.

Download the sample from - http://cid-0666e397c5ca74dd.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Screencast/TaskServiceLibrary.zip

For more information
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/cc950529.aspx
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/content/en-us/msft/netframework/wcf/rest/Overview
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203052(printer).aspx

Infosys: Data Integration in the Cloud

Charles — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:42:00 GMT

Infosys Technologies Limited has created a data integration hub which is built on top of Azure platform. Principal Architect of Infosys, Jitendra Pal Thethi, demonstrates how the hosting platform of Windows Azure can provide a solution for closer collaboration with your company’s customers and partners.

Infosys has a global footprint with over 50 offices and development centers in India, China, Australia, the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, Canada and Japan. With over 103,000 employees. Infosys' service offerings span business and technology consulting, application services, systems integration, product engineering, custom software development, maintenance, re-engineering, independent testing and validation services, IT infrastructure services and business process outsourcing.

Check out the Microsoft ISV site for more information about ISVs working with Microsoft.

ARCast.TV - Ron Jacobs on SOAP and RESTful Services

Bob Familiar — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:48:00 GMT

Ron Jacobs discusses REST and SOAP with Bob Familiar: the differences, the similarities, and how Windows Communication Foundation supports these distributed networking protocols.

Windows Web Services

Yochay Kiriaty — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:41:00 GMT

With Windows Web Services, you can create applications that communicate easily with a local computer or a remote Web service. Windows Web Services is a native-code implementation of SOAP and provides core network communication by supporting a broad set of the Web services (WS) family of protocols. Windows Web Services is a peer to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF – managed-code Web services), and provides a high-performance subset of WCF functionality.

Watch Yochay Kiriaty, Windows 7 Technical Evangelist, and Windows Web Services API PM Nikola Dudar as we explain the Windows native Web Services APIs, and why Microsoft created a new set of Web Services APIs when we have WCF. For more technical content on Windows 7 and few cool code samples, go to the Windows 7 Blog for Developers.

You can always watch the Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code PDC session in case you missed the live session

E-conomic: ERP as SaaS

Charles — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

e-conomic is Danish ISV developing an ERP SaaS solution using ASP and ASP.NET. In this Inside out cast, Senior Developer Ole Hyldahl Hansen takes us around common challenges of integrating ASP and ASP.NET and still maintain and access state. Besides technology challenges, it’s interesting to see how an ERP system can be exposed as a SaaS solution. API documentation are here and WSDL is exposed here.

decast - Tunneling a PUT through POST with RESTful WCF Services

Rob Bagby — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:09:00 GMT

Many client technologies such as Silverlight 2 only support the HTTP Methods GET and POST. However, you may want to follow a HI-REST architectural style when designing your RESTful APIs, taking advantage of additional HTTP methods such as PUT and DELETE. In this screencast, Rob Bagby illustrates how to tunnel HTTP Methods such as PUT and DELETE through POST, as well as how to consume these services with Silverlight 2. This screencast illustrates some of the great functionality available in the WCF REST Starter Kit.

ARCast.TV - Michael Manos on Datacenter Leadership

Bob Familiar — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:53:00 GMT

This ARCast features Michael Manos who leads all the datacenters for Microsoft globally. Michael is leading Microsoft’s transformation into massive scale datacenter environments for Web 2.0 and online services. Michael is interviewed by Lewis Curtis.

ARCast.TV - Eric Newcomer of IONA on the state of Interoperability

Bob Familiar — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:36:00 GMT

Eric Newcomer, Chief Technology Officer of IONA, discusses the challenges of interoperability in a heterogeneous world, the state of middleware and interoperability standards with Bob Familiar.

WCF and AIF in Dynamics 2009: Chatting with Michael Merz

Ben Riga — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:56:00 GMT

In this video I’m back on the Advanta campus chatting with Michael Merz, Program Manager for Application Integration Framework (AIF) on the Dynamics AX team.

AIF is a standards-based framework that allows you to publish and consume web services. It’s used primarily in integration scenarios when connecting Dynamics AX with other systems. AX also has .NET Business Connector (BC.NET) for integrating with .NET applications. BC.NET is more for client side integration. AIF is all about web services and is completely standards-based. Under the covers AIF takes full advantage of .NET using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). For more complex integration scenarios AIF can also help expose services using MSMQ and BizTalk.

With Dynamics AX 2009, the team ships a bunch of services (about 60 out of the box) that are ready for use. That includes, for example, the more common scenarios like integration with sales orders or customers. AIF allows you to create, read, update and delete those sales orders while maintaining the integrity of the database (i.e. without directly touching the database at all). This is done independent of the transport so when developing you could begin by updating via http and later switch to MSMQ. This can be as simple as enabling the service then “generating” which generates the WCF interface (i.e. WSDL). That web service is then available to be consumed by any standards-based client (including apps written in php, java and naturally any of the languages in Visual Studio). You can also configure the service endpoints to change the binding or authentication parameters.

In the video, Michael walks us through using a standard Excel Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project to consume a AX 2009 sales order service that is exposed using AIF. He also shows us how, by using WS-Addressing in the WCF headers, you can pass a target company for a web service call. By default, AX limits error messages coming back from the server for security reasons. Michael shows us how to configure AX to propagate those errors when you need to see them.

Dynamics AX is a rich platform for supply chain management and financials. AIF opens up AX so that ISVs can build on that richness by integrating their own applications. Sometimes when you do that you need to consume a web service exposed by external applications. We see here how you can plug external web services into the AX processes. In this case, Michael shows us how when trying to create a customer in Dynamics AX with a name that has been blacklisted by the US government (“Bin Laden”, for instance. Yikes! :) ) the customer create process calls out to an external web service in the cloud to verify the customer name. This seamless integration of external processes is a boon for ISVs that need those deep integration points. Michael explains how. In order to do this sort of integration you build a Service Reference in the Application Object Tree (AOT) to provide the parameters. AX takes care of much of work by generating the artifacts (compilation, deploying, bundling etc) that are deployed and executed on the server. CLR interop is available in order to use .NET DLLs and their classes.

Some code samples are available here:

Application Integration Framework Overview (MSDN)
Calling the Customer and Vendor Services (Dianne Siebold)

deCast - Creating a HI-REST PUT Service That Exposes Insert and Update

Rob Bagby — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:14:00 GMT

RESTful services expose more than just GET. Many times, we also have to expose the capability to insert, update and delete. There are many differing opinions on how inserts, updates and deletes should be modeled in a "RESTful" architecture. This screencast illustrates one such model and further shows how to implement this model with WCF 3.5. Join Rob Bagby as he shows you how to implement a HI-REST service utilizing PUT for inserts and updates. Future deCasts will illustrate other models.

deCast - Building an AJAX-Friendly WCF Service

Rob Bagby — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:24:00 GMT

WCF 3.5 provides the ability to easily expose services to AJAX client applications. Specifically, the webHttpBinding has an "AJAX-Friendly" endpoint behavior. What do I mean by "AJAX-Friendly"? To me, it means that we will create a client proxy that knows how to call your service from an AJAX client. What used to take dozens, if not hundreds, of lines of code now takes 3. In this screencast, Rob Bagby will illustrate how this works in great detail.

deCast - Consuming a HI-REST GET Service From Silverlight 2 (Beta 2)

Rob Bagby — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:23:00 GMT

Watch Rob Bagby illustrate how to consume a HI-REST GET Service (exposed using WCF 3.5) from Silverlight 2, beta 2. Rich Internet Applications are a common consumer of RESTful services. In this screencast Rob shows you just how to consume these lightweight services.

deCast - Creating a HI-REST GET Service with WCF 3.5

Rob Bagby — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:56:00 GMT

More and more services are being exposed utilizing a RESTful architectural style. This screencast illustrates how to take advantage of WCF 3.5 to expose a service RESTfully in a HI-REST manner. Rob Bagby illustrates how to control the HTTP verb, control the URI of your service, choose a representation format and return appropriate HTTP status codes.

Creating a custom SharePoint webpart for CRM

Girish Raja — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:23:00 GMT

In this screencast, we write a simple SharePoint webpart that pulls data from the CRM 4.0 VPC.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/The-Dynamics-Duo-talk-about-Dynamics-CRM-and-SharePoint/ to take a look at a cool dashboard you can build with custom connected webparts.

You can download the code for this screencast here. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/ for more code samples and related screencasts.

The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM and SharePoint

Ben Riga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:46:00 GMT

In this segment Girish and I talk about how Dynamics CRM integrates with SharePoint. We begin with a little guidance for where you might use one over the other and where they work well together. And they sure do go well together. “Separated at birth” is how I put it in the video. :) Girish’s demo shows a custom SharePoint page. Not many people know that SharePoint can be stylized using CSS to build sites that look nothing like plain vanilla SharePoint. This is a pretty good example of that.

We use a SharePoint List Web Part to pull data from CRM to show a list of CRM users and the hours from their time sheets. This was pulled directly from CRM using web services. We also show how could use that data to display a dashboard style gauge using Dundas Gauge for SharePoint. You can pull CRM data directly into SharePoint to build a dashboard. You can then pull that dashboard into the CRM web client (minus the SharePoint chrome). By pulling it into the web client it automatically shows up in the Outlook client. Speaking of Outlook; in the last segment we talked about customization but didn’t show the Outlook client so Girish gives us a quick tour of how that works also.

Each of the forms in CRM are URL-addressable. Girish puts that to good use in showing how you can pop a CRM form directly from within SharePoint. He also shows how CRM lights up automatically when you have Office Communicator installed leaving room for some interesting Unified Communication scenarios. We should probably do an episode on UC soon.

The segment wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t show some code. Girish built the list part using the Visual Studio Web Part project template. The code to pull in the time sheets into a list web part is about 10 lines of C#. The hardest part was doing the authentication. CRM provides a plug-able authentication mechanism and 3 different auth options out of the box. On-premise deployments will likely use Active Directory, while CRM Online uses Windows Live ID and finally if you’re deploying in a partner-hosted mode you’ll use form-based authentication. Girish shows how as an ISV you can build your application once and take all of those options into account. After that the code you write is portable across all the deployment options.

William Oellermann on the Managed Services Engine

Kirk Evans — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Kirk Evans talks with William Oellermann about the Managed Services Engine (MSE). MSE is a solution built by Microsoft's SOA Solutions Team that facilitates enterprise SOA through service virtualization. MSE provides the ability to support versioning, abstraction, management, routing, and runtime policy enforcement for services.

Everything you see in the video is available through the free CodePlex version, available at http://codeplex.com/servicesengine.

In this video, William demonstrates how to use MSE to create a new endpoint and WSDL without concern for the implementation behind it, how to quickly virtualize operations into that endpoint, change the message transport from SOAP to POX, and finally how to add behaviors for policy enforcement and management. He also demonstrates how to integrate services with BizTalk's Business Activity Monitoring, enabling mining and surfacing of data through SQL Server Reporting Services.

endpoint.tv - SOAP and REST a Perspective

Ron Jacobs — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 12:41:00 GMT

Most of you know all about SOAP but perhaps you have been hearing a lot more about REST web services lately. Wondering what this is all about? Well check out this episode where Bob Familiar and I discuss the two.