code-u-like

Recently I was clearing through a box of old stuff, and I found a copy of ".Net - The Internet Magazine" from March 1995. Seeing the magazine again reminded when I bought it - I was in my third year at University, and the only practical way I had to get onto the net was to use the Sun Sparcstations in the university lab. From what I remember of the internet in 1995, most of it was about Monty Python or Star Trek. What I found in the old magazine pretty much supported that memory. Some interesting snippets from this important historical document include: An article with the headline "Microsoft's on-line plan still waiting - The Microsoft Network is raring to go, but Windows 95 is delayed, yet again.". The article explains that Microsoft expects their on-line commercial services such as MSN to become 'as popular as TV'. MSN is planned to be an AOL-type network with proprietary content not available on the main internet. Meanwhile, the shipping date for Win

If you've only ever worked with Web Services in Dot Net, you could be forgiven for expecting it to be easy to use Web Services to interface with other platforms. In Visual Studio, it's all a bit Fisher-Price: you define your Web Methods, then add a Web Reference to the client and everything ticks along nicely. You don't even see any XML. Recently I've been working for a client getting a Dot Net Web Service to work with a third-party system build in Perl. I have now discovered there are two sorts of web services: 1) Mickey Mouse Web Services in which the client and server both run Dot Net 2) Proper, Serious Web Services in which the server runs Dot Net and the client runs Not Net (anything else). Other people in the industry seem to have noticed this too, and the current official term for Proper Serious Web Services is 'Interoperable Web Services'; that is, Web Services That Actually Operate. Other people have already written lots of advice for building I