My birthday....

Today I am 33 years old. Shit I am getting really old.... Thanks to everybody for the calls and gifts.

SOAP Toolkit 3, ATL/COM, AXIS : FUN with Web Services

Today I was able to validate a first step in one of the change we are experiencing at work. The project is to wrap an original project (C++ dll and VB6 ActiveX) around a C++ ATL/COM dll to be able to expose it as a Web Service in IIS 6. I used SOAP Toolkit 3.0 to do that. The difficulties were that there were some complicated structures and array of structures to pass in and get back from the Web Service. First I was amazed to see that the STK 3 was able to handle that complexity. Then I created a stub using AXIS WSDL2Java and little client application. It is really cool to see those peaces of code communicating without any issues. I like the idea of having two totally different worlds able to talk together ;-) No we have to deal with another big step the integration of the different possible stubs in our Virtual Transport Framework. This will allow users of the framework to call a service without knowing the transport protocol, the location, the load balancing strategy, the error handling…

Migration

Last weekend was reserved for the migration of the servers at work from Windows NT4 to Windows 2003. The good point is that after working from the Friday evening to the Saturday morning, the servers were up and running again. The applications owners were testing their applications on Saturday and sent back an OK. Then I monitored the applications all the day, and there were no issues. That a first migration.

The second has nothing to do with my work; it is about my web site: Tech Head Brothers. My friend Ed Daniel offered me to host the site. HEY!!!! Ed I will never be thankfully enough for that. So I have to deploy the entire site to this new server.

Groove and WSS

That's it !!! Groove is working with the Windows Sharepoint Services. I just had a try after the update of Groove Workspace 2.5i and it WORKS.

Chapters finished

I finally managed to finish the last chapter I had to write concerning a book about Sharepoint 2.0 I am writing with some other Microsoft MVPs. I am presenting the way to develop Web Parts with Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET framework. That was an interesting experience. Now we need to see who will edit it.

WS-Security Drilldown in Web Services Enhancements 2.0 Article

If you want to understand the different security aspect in Web Services I recommend you this new cool MSDN Article: How to use Web Services Enhancements 2.0 to implement security, trust, and secure conversations in Web services architecture.

My new HP notebook

I finally gots my new notebook, a HP nx7000 notebook. WOUAH !! Impressive. WIFI, Bluetooth, SD Reader, 1.6 GHz, 1 Gb RAM (now 512Mb but waiting the extension), 15.1'' Screen (16/9, 1680x1050), Radeon 9200 Mobility 64 Mb, 60 Gb 5400 RPM and Windows XP Pro.

I am currently setting it up for our whole team with Microsoft Tool: Sysprep.

World 2003 to create content

I finally managed to have my content XML schema version 2.
This allows me to edit the content of my site in World 2003. I have to say that it is pretty cool to type articles in World and then just to save them in XML and post then on the site.

Tech Head Brothers 1.1 is online

Finally it is online!!! After some weeks of work I managed to have the new version of my site online. The change was initiated by my hoster because they will not support anymore .NET Framework 1.0 by 1st of September.
 
Basically here are the changes:

• .NET Framework 1.1 usage
• RSS Feed for all contents: Articles, How To, News.
• PDF creation for all articles
• New logo, I am not a designer so... I hope it is ok :)

But the biggest changes where done internally:

• InfoPath usage to post News
• Word XML to write articles
• nFop usage to generate articles
• Added a cache to the XML Web Service client (a tool to get content from other site)
• And certainly more that I cannot remember.

Visit the site here and please let me know what you thing about it in the comments, thanks!

PDF generation

New features on the new version of my website. I worked out a little more the pdf document generator using nFOP. Now the pictures that are displayed on the web pages are also displayed on the pdf version of the different articles. I had to work also on the XSLT file transforming my XML articles to XSL-FO.

I still have a stange bug with the link in the pdf. The mouse pointer is changed to show that there is a link but at the top of the text. As much as the text is at the bottom of the document as much as the link is at the top of the text. Anyone is using nFOP?

Update
You might check a sample rendering here. The article is in french, but you'll get the idea.