Scott Hanselman

Surprise.  WSE 2.0 is released.  Everyone saw this announcement coming, but it's nice to get it out and move on.  Rebecca is onstage right now, doing a demo on WSE and the new Office Information Bridge Framework with Ballmer. 

Wizzy Thoughts

The release of WSE (for me) brings up a number of different questions around Web Services on the .NET Framework. 

• It's great that these standards are being followed so closely and that Microsoft is so quick to support the WS*.* specs.  However, how long will we have WSE to use while we wait for Indigo and the rest of the specs?  Is it something that will be supported for the next five years?
  Question: Would you go live in production with WSE 2.0?  Or, would you find an out-of-band solution for security? (Certs, IP-SEC, Networks)
  My Personal Answer (today): I would use WSE when required for Interop but with caution.  
  Question: Is WSE the COM-Interop of Web Services (an interim bridging technology that will ALWAYS be with us, but interim none the less) and is that a bad thing?
  My Personal Answer (today): Kinda feels like it!    
  I've been thinking more and more about simpler solutions.  When you don't need routing and intermediaries, why not go move to a more REST-ful solution?  They are certainly easy to write, but there's not a lot of "framework" around it.  Perhaps that's a good thing, but while I could write a REST-ful proxy generator, it'd be nice to see formalized support for simpler architectures.  If you know me, you know I'm ALL about Web Services, but at the same time, the more I read the WS*.* specs and talk to Joe Programmer, I worry that we're freaking him out. 
  Question: The Basic Profile is great, but are the other specs getting too complicated?
  My Personal Answer (today): Kinda feels like it!  WS-Security will be more useful when there is a more support on the Java side.  As far as WS-Policy, it seems that Dynamic Policy is where the money's at and it's a bummer WSE doesn't support it.    

What are your answers?

New .NET Tools vs. Existing Open Source Tools

Now Prashant is showing the Visual Studio Team System (Whitehorse).  It includes Unit Testing and Code Coverage support.  The Code Coverage stuff is pretty sexy; it highlights the code that wasn't tested in Red and the tested code in Green.  I need to learn more about theis new Unit Testing before I feel good about it.

It's easy to justify using NUnit when there are no Unit Testing tools included with Visual Studio.  When VSS came out (actually when it was purchased from OneTree) Microsoft was bringing Source Control to the masses.  While lots of folks don't use an SCC at all, many folks use VSS simply because it's free.  However, often folks have to suffer with VSS for a few years before they justify a change over to CVS or something else.  I'm going to dig into this Unit testing stuff to see how to relates to NUnit (which we use with much happiness) and the up-and-coming MBUnit.  There's a lot of interesting stuff going on.  I don't know if these qualify as "smackdowns," but it sure seems like a few wheels are being re-invented.  I need to get my thoughts straight and think about:

• MSBuild vs. NAnt
• Team System Test vs. NUnit and NUnitAddin
• Team System Coverage vs. nCover, etc.

As an aside, wouldn't it be nice to include Lutz's Reflector with VS.NET?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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