If you are a programmer you probably heard or tried out Arc by now. Every programmer on the face of this earth is eager and keen to play with it thanks to Paul Graham's wonderful writing skills. But please stop it. I cannot for one begin to imagine why people were expecting anything more than what Arc is today. He has never claimed to replace your favorite language anytime soon. I have programmed in Lisp and I love it but I cannot for one imaging it replacing C based language anytime soon. Like it or not we don't yet have an alternative to C based language yet, Python is half way there. The fact that Python 3.0 is going to be backward incompatible shows that it is hard it is achieve that and it is going to take time.

Your Mac is actualy a PC, computer geeks out there know this but it doesn't matter. I'll tell why. What was a thought to be the biggest blunder made by Apple is turning out to best mistake anyone could every make. Back in the 80's Apple decided that Mac would remain proprietary and not a standard that would allow anyone to build a Mac just like a PC. It didn't sense then because PC would soon be everywhere and it would be a lot cheaper to build or buy a PC when compared to a Mac. Fast forward 25 years. You have PC's everywhere. Everyone has it. Apple decided to use the PC architecture for their computers for economical reasons but they will never ever tell you this. Why? Because you have a market with gazillion computers all of which are PC's but you are a Mac. This is the biggest advertising opportunity since the 60's and boy are they making use of it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/richardbpi/archive/2006/04/10/572644.aspx http://www.digitaldeposit.net/blog/2007_08_01_saravanakumarmv_archive.html http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa559328.aspx (Enabling) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995583.aspx (Troubleshooting) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa578158.aspx  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms946955.aspx (how-to, not as good as or useful as mine :) )

There are two ways to expose your business process as web service. One allows you to expose your orchestration within Biztalk as a web service and the other allows you to create new web service based on a schema file (xsd). Either way you will be converting a HTTP SOAP request to a biztalk message, do all your processing based on the message within the Biztalk world and then return a SOAP response. If you need to expose some of your existing business processes then you would likely be exposing an orchestration. If you starting off, exposing schemas could be a better option. My advice stick with the first option unless you really have good reasons not to. Once you read the rest of this How-To you will know why. What should have been a piece of cake, something that shouldn't have take more than few hours took forever. The web publishing wizard will gather some information from you about your schema and will auto generate c# code for you that will call your biztalk component responsible to send this SOAP request to a SOAP adapter. Bring up the web publishing wizard and select "Publish schemas as web services" option. The second screen allows you to name your web service, the web methods and the parameters. There is bug in the component that is auto generating code. What the wizards calls your web service description is actually the namespace under which the class will be defined. If you give these two the same name the generated code will NOT compile. Make sure that the web service description, the root node and the class name, the child node of the root node DO NOT have the same name. In the next screen change the target namespace of the web service. Specify the location you want to host your web service at, if there is a web service already present in that location you will get the option to overwrite it. Check allow anonymous access to your web service. Also check the create Biztalk receive location and select the Biztalk application under which you want to create this receive location. Next screen gives you a summary. Review it, if everything looks good keep going. If you get errors at this point then it will most probably be an issues with permissions related to IIS or Biztalk. If there were no errors then you will given the URL to the published web service and file location of the .net solution. Open up the URL in your browser to make sure everything went well. You will have a link that says Something.asmx, click on that if you don't see any errors you are good. You are not done yet. You have exposed your schema as a web service and also created a receive location in Biztalk but there are no subscribers to that receive location. So if you try to invoke the web service will greeted by "Internal SOAP error" message. Very useful huh. Yeah that's all you get. Create an orchestration and subscribe to this port. Here is big gotcha that isn't documented any where in MSDN documents. The operation type of your logical receive port should match your web method name or else the message will NOT be picked up the orchestration. You might want to use the Biztalk subscription viewer to make sure you are subscribed to the port.   Don't start your Biztalk app and send a SOAP request, yet. You are not done. Now you know why this is so painful. Bring up your Biztalk admin console. Go to the receive port that the web publishing wizard created for you.   By default the wizard will select PassThru pipeline for both receive and send pipelines. Now technically you should select XMLReceive and XMLTransmit. Do this unless your schema is multi part in which case you want to select PassThruReceive and XMLTransmit. The SOAP adapter for some reason, I don't know if this is another bug, puts the wrong DocumentSpecName property in the message context in case of a multi part message. So when if you do PassThru there won't be any checking and it goes through. Obviously this won't work if you have inbound schemas.

This is by far the best software licensing agreement I have seen so far. I really don't care if the software is open source or not. But I do care if software licensing is human readable and is written with someone with common sense.

http://wordweb.info/free/licence5.html

Oh yeah the software rocks too. Check it out you will love it.

Extreme technical crap follows, if the title didn't make sense don't even try to read. Day 1: Publish Schemas as a Web Service Suppose you want create a web service with Biztalk all you need to do is define your Request and Response in a XML schema file and use the Web Services Publishing Wizard to create the web service. Not a single line of coding. Pretty cool huh, wait until you try it.

Why?

I don't know yet. But I got to, it seems doing this will add more value to your web services as Biztalk can do some enterprisey stuff. Will update this once I know better.

How?

Do these in the exact order http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa559328.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa577935.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa578158.aspx Once your done with all that you will most likely come across one of these issues. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995583.aspx Fix them. All done good. You are not done yet. Now send a request to your web service and hope that it doesn't time out and returns a response. As for me, I keep getting a timeout error. Yes, I did try setting a higher timeout (20 mins) yet didn't make any difference.

I knew it http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/26/2152246&from=rss. My iBook has been crashing every two weeks or so. This never happened with the PowerPC versions. Intel can no longer rely on blaming Windows for their fuckups.