MS dot Net Architecture

Here are my notes and comments about Microsoft's push for dominating developement tools and web services.

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Microsoft's ".NET" (dot net) strategy and ".NET Framework" technical architecture is Microsoft's answer to Java and CORBA and the lawsuits.

.NET, Java Killer?

Microsoft had first said J++ is no longer one of the languages in the Visual Studio.NET suite of many languages. Microsot's Java User Migration Path (JUMP) is to the C# (pronounced "see sharp") language.

Microsoft has countered Java's “Write once, Run anywhere” premise, with “Write many languages, Run on one Micosoft platform”.

Microsoft adapted the Java runtime into Microsoft's own Intermediate Language (MSIL) called OptIL, associated compilers: one for each of the "20" existing programming source languages, and a run-time compiler to create machine code executable native to each hardware platform.

My question: Does this sound like "no trouble at all"? So the complete solution is not likely to be available -- let alone bullet-proof -- in the short term.

Much like the Java RunTime engine, a Common Language Runtime (CLR) execution engine (EE) "assembles" and "manages" OptIL code and provides services such as memory management, cross language integration, exception handling, code access security, and automatic lifetime control of objects.

Prepare to be Assimilated

.NET applications interoperate using a contract of cooperation.

Microsoft 's replacement for IDL (Interface Definition Language) is to have self-describing objects. The new OptIL compilers supply metadata for the .NET Framework to locate and unwind stack frames, and include information required for debugging and garbage collection, as well as security attributes, marshaling data, extended class and member definitions, version binding, and other information required by the runtime.

.NET applications, components, and controls are built using Microsoft's .NET Framework class library. Existing "unmanaged" COM applications will use a COM callable wrapper (CCW) to access system functionality managed by CLS-compliant library of classes, interfaces, and value types.

ASP.NET vs. Java EJB

ASP.NET is the next generation ASP's proprietary server-side web services programming model which makes use of IIS5.0. New features include the Windows Forms framework.

.NET Framework Overviews by Brad Abrams, Microsoft's lead program manager on the .NET Framework team, and and C# inventor Anders Heilsberg

The Foundstone dot NET Security Framework

Micrsoft's public .NET demo sites:

ibuyspy.com retail store

Duwamish.com retail store implemented in VB and C# within logical tiers

FMStocks.com .NET service in VB and C#

Favorites.com .NET service.

More from Micrsoft

Microsoft's .NET Framework Overview and Glossary.

Microsoft's XML TOC

Preparing Your Visual Basic 6.0 Applications for the Upgrade to Visual Basic.NET This October 2000 article discusses the fundamental architectural issues when upgrading from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic.NET using the Visual Basic.NET Upgrade Tool.

Microsoft has a 5 day course 2373B Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic.NET offered for $2,125 by Quickstart

IBM and Microsoft, (without Sun) created the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), industry consortium.

Download Dotnetredist.exe Microsoft .NET Redistributable Package (21.8 MB). When executed, it extracts file Dotnetfx.exe and client time elements for the .NET Framework.

CLR (Common Language Runtime)

"Doesn't Play Well With Others"

Microsoft has been criticized for not being very much involved with the development of Business Transaction Protocols (BTP) by Boston-based OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) -- which maintains the xml.coverpages.org -- and the United Nations CEFACT , who are trying to standardize XML tag names for all business transactions being conducted on-line.

Let's see how long Microsoft will be part of this group or break off so they can claim patent rights on what others have developed.

MS SOAP vs. IIOP

SOAP is also supported by Java and J2EE.

BizTalk

Microsoft submitted the SOAP specification to W3C.

Microsoft has the MCAD - Microsoft Certified Application Developer for .NET credential.

Microsoft ADO.NET (Core Reference) by David Sceppa

Introducing Microsoft .NET My Services by Jeannine Gailey and Christopher A. Jones

Inside C#, Second Edition by Tom Archer

Microsoft Visual C# (Core Reference) by Mickey Williams

Building COM+ Applications Using Microsoft .NET Enterprise Services, Course 2557

Application Upgrade and Interoperability Using Visual Studio .NET, Course 2571

Web Services UDDI &

Application Concept	Web Standard	Programs
Data	XML Universal data format	Objects
Schema	XSD Universal type system	Classes
Directory	UDDI Directory of Services
Listing	DISCO Service discovery
Services	WSDL Service descriptions	Methods
Services Invocation	SOAP	Calls

• Visual Studio SOAP toolkit for Microsoft Windows® 2000 (not Win 9x) can be download from
  • Versions:
    • Version 1 released July 2000 interoperates with Visual Studio.NET Beta 1 uses older Service Description Language (SDL) and scalar atomic data types using UTF-8 encoding based on Windows code page 1252.
    • Version 2 Beta 1 released January 2, 2001 based on SOAP Specification version 1.1, adds support for new Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.0 contracts to define the SOAP messages and service call formats; Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), and the Version 2.0 will pass strings to BSTR parameters encoded as UTF-16.
    • The final release of SOAP Toolkit version 2.0 will be fully supported by Microsoft product support.
  • This requires Visual Studio SP 4.
  • The Listener provided is ASP, not ISAPI.
  • MSXML Parser 3.0 is included in the SOAP toolkit.
• All this work done by developers will be hadled automatically by Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET which was distributed as Beta 1 on January 2001.

  Although VisualBasic.NET (also known as Visual Basic 7.0) features new Web Forms which are HTML pages with Visual Basic events (such as native support for accessibility). Microsoft recommends using it for business objects and use ASP.NET, an enhanced version of ASP, which uses Web Forms for interfacing with Web Services hosted by ASP.NET, which targets disconnected data. The Mobile Internet Toolkit is part of ASP.NET.

  The NET Framework SDK TDG (Tool Developer Guide) is included in the ASP.NET CD to manipulate new & old registry classes.
• IE 5.5

Chris Dengler's July 2000 SDL wrapper code to returing ADO Recordtypes and arrays with SOAP messaging.

Understanding SOAP: The Authoritative Solution by Kennard Scribner

Plumbing

dot NET eliminiates COM plumbing

COM	dot NET
Registration	self-described apps
GUIDs	hierarchial namespaces
.IDL files	unified object model
HRESULTs	structured execptions
IUnknown	common root object
AddRef/release	automatic garbabe collector
CoCreateInstance	new operator

Code Profilers

$295 ANTS (Advanced .NET Tool Suite) Profiler works with $690 ANTS Load and $2985 ANTS Enterprise Load. From Red-gate, makers of SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare.

DevPartner from Compuware

Borland's $700 Optimizeit Profiler for the Microsoft .NET Framework

Performance Tips and Tricks in .NET Applications: A .NET Developer Platform White Paper by Emmanuel Schanzer, August 2001

Performance Considerations for Run-Time Technologies in the .NET Framework: A .NET Developer Platform White Paper by Emmanuel Schanzer, August 2001

Assets

This describes the artifacts of an XML based system, starting from the client's point of view.

Graphic based on Karthik Ravindran's voice presentation: Implementing and Accessing Web Services Using Visual Basic 6.0 and the SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio

Client ROPE Proxy

A ROPE proxy serves a similiar function as WinSock, through which client software issue and receive communications to web services on a web server.

If a SOAP client is on a different computer than the SOAP server, you will need to copy ROPE.dll from the Visual Studio SOAP Toolkit and register it on the client computer (tunning command regsvr32 rope.dll).

Got SOAP?

The ROPE Proxy uses methods in COM objects written to SOAP standard which defines the "handshaking" between client and server.

A client first sends a Services Description method ROPE.SDMethodInfo and other methods to discover what web services a particular server provides

The ROPE.SoapPackager object creates a SOAP envelope and calls

It then calls ROPE.WireTransfer to execute HTTP GET and POST requests by calling methods AddStdSOAPHeaders and PostDataToURI using parameters DataSent and DataReceived.

Web Serices Discovery

methods in the ROPE.SDServiceDescriptors collection: <> ROPE.SDEndPointInfo describes the URI location of web services.

ROPE.SDMethodInfo provides information about methods exposed by a Web Service.

ROPE.SDParameterInfo then provides requirements for calling those methods.

WSDL = Web Services Description Language

Describes the methods available. contract between a server and its clients. Example: ProdInfo.dll

SDL = Service Description Language

Here is a sample request.

<SERVICE>
   <ADDRESSES>
   <ADDRESS URL='http://x.com/soap/Products.asp'>
   <IMPLEMENTS name='Products/'>
</SERVICE>

The SDL wizard can generate this.

ASP

XML references COM methods.

<%@ language=VB Script %>
<%Option Explicit

ADO

<element name='GetProductsResponse'>
 <type>
  <element name='ProductStruct'/>
  <element name='ProductID' type='dt:string'/>
  <element name='ProductName' type='dt:string'/>
 </type>
<element>

For XML Schema

Resources

For programming advice, tips, code snippets, and answers to technical questions from developers using the latest technologies? Try one of these independent Web communities:

angryCoder Check out this e-zine, written using the Microsoft .NET Framework, where you can submit articles and download source code for a minimal donation.

C# Corner has developers using C# and .NET meet and exchange their ideas, code, and expertise through discussion forums or submissions.

The Code Project is a community of developers using Windows who specialize in C++, MFC, C#, and .NET.

DotNetJunkies.com offers information, tools, and education utilizing the ASP.NET Framework.

Visual Studio and dot Net

International .NET Association

User groups interested in the Microsoft .NET platform have the International .NET Association (http://www.ineta.org) resource to connect with their peers and sponsors.

INETA enables interaction among user groups interested in .NET, providing them with unique educational support. Make sure your user group is as vibrant and effective as it can be in providing .NET education-register with INETA today at http://info@ineta.org.

Lutz Roeder's Reflector for .NET is a class browser for .NET components and assemblies. It features hierarchical assembly and namespace views, type and member dictionary index search, type reference search, custom attributes view, an IL disassembler and viewers for C# XML documentations and MSDN help. Assembly dependency trees, supertype/subtype hierarchies and resources can be inspected as well. Function prototypes are displayed in C#, VB and Eiffel syntax. Windows XP enabled.

VS.NET IDE

The VS.NET IDE (Integrated development environment) is named devenv.exe. So you can invoke it by typing "devenv" (with no quotes) from the Run window. To use shortcut keys, type Ctrl-Esc, R (for Run), devenv, Enter.

Efficiently Using Expressions (Aggregates, Selections,

Pelli's dotNetWiki.org blog & forum offering downloads.

Visual Studio Magazine columns by Roger Jennings of Oakleaf Systems July 2, 2002 on ACT

.NET Fun Facts at the Sprout

Testing .NET

.TEST integrates with Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET® to perform Static Analysis of finished .NET Framework classes and methods based on "Best Practices" and ".NET Framework Design Guidelines". It automatically creates unit test harnesses, stubs, and test cases for automating regression testing. It's in the same Automated Error Prevention product line of group-oriented tools as Parasoft's JTest for Java.

$28 Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications by Microsoft Press (September 25, 2002) is based on the Microsoft ACT tool, but the concepts discussed are relevant to other tools as well, such as structuring load tests and troubleshooting performance bottlenecks and memory leaks.

$30 Performance Tuning and Optimization for ASP.NET Applications (Apress, April 2003) by Jeffrey Hasan, Kenneth Tu

Maximizing .NET Performance by Nick Wienholt who describes NPerf benchmark testing framework for benchmarking .NET classes and methods. Like Nunit, it's a CodeProject administered by Jonathan de Halleux.

The NPerf framework uses reflection to gather the benchmark testers, the tested types, runs the tests and output the results. The user just have to write the benchmark methods. Its custom attributes are located in its NPerf.Framework namespace, NPerf.Framework.dll assembly.

Microsoft .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating XML Web Services and .NET Remoting (Microsoft Press, February 12, 2003) by Matthew MacDonald describes how to use VB.NET (not C#) for Remoting, XML Web services, Message Queuing.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) in Microsoft .NET (Microsoft Professional) by James W. Newkirk (administrator of the NUnit open source project for unit testing tool for the .NET environment) and Alexei A. Vorontsov

$40 Designing Scalable .NET Applications (Expert's Voice) (APress; November 1, 2003) by Rickard Redler, Joachim Rossberg

.NET WinForms

WinForms (Windows Forms) use a rich (fat) client program which installs on the client's machine to provide users a rich graphical interface.

Winforms are encapsulated in the System.Windows.Forms namespace, which provides:

• System.Windows.Forms.Form to manage windows.
• System.Windows.Forms.Control base class for processing keyboard, mouse, and Windows messages.
• System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase
• System.Windows.Forms.TextBoxBase
• System.Windows.Forms.ScrollableControl
• System.Windows.Forms.ContainerControl to manage scroll bars.
• System.Windows.Forms.Panel to group mutually exclusive radio buttons and other controls
• System.Windows.Forms.UserControl to derive custom controls.