Consuming asmx web service with raw request

In normal case, to consume a asmx web service, we would go with the easy ways like using the "Add Web Reference" in Visual Studio menu to create the proxy class and then call the web service methods through that class. However, there are cases that we do not want to use that easy approach, for example: we are writing a client using PHP to call that web service or simple we want to understand how the web service works. In those cases, you will need to consume the web service in a "hard way": call the web service method by sending the raw request. 

When working with one of my QC colleagues, he had encountered this need. If you are also one of the guys facing with this situation which requires you to call the web service method in the "hard way", then, the soapUI utility should provide a great help to you.

By providing the URL to the wsdl of the web service, it will automatically generate the template of the raw requests for you and allow you to get the raw responses from the web service by executing those raw requests.

RIA Development with Silverlight and WCF RIA Service

A small presentation was presented last Thursday (06-Jan) in a Microsoft event at HCMC to share the experience in using Silverlight to develop RIA application. Basically, the following three benefits were focused in the talk:

1. Cool and user friendly interaction
2. Feature rich business apps with WCF RIA service
3. Unified development environment

Slide used in the presentation can be downloaded here.

WCF Introduction Presentation

This Tuesday, I had a chance to provide a training session on the topic "WCF Introduction" for Microsoft to cover the following objectives:

• Understand the importance of SOA applications
• Understand the benefits of using WCF to implement SOA applications
• Understand concepts used in WCF
• Able to implement simple WCF services
• Able to create client to consume WCF services

Slide of the presentation can be downloaded here

Disable XML Comment warning in Workflow auto-generated code in .NET Framework 4.0

In order to make sure our code is proper documented, it's a good practice to check the "XML documentation file" setting in the project's Build tab (with that setting turned on, all public, internal, protected classes, methods, properties inside the project are required to have XML Comment put in place) and turn on the "Treat Warning as Error" in the project. With this, it will force the developers to have their code commented properly at the early stage once it is introduced which in turns will help to reduce the maintenance effort in the later phase. Everything should be working fine until you need to work with the Workflow Activity in .NET Framework 4.0.

Normally, in auto-generated code (code generated by .NET Framework), proper warning disable statement is added inside the generated code to by pass the warnings. Unfortunately, there is an issue with the auto-generated code with the Workflow Activity in .NET Framework 4.0. The proper warning disable statement is not put in place. Hence, it causes the build to fail due to setting the option "Treat Warning as Error". It's even unfortunate to figure out that nothing you can interfere in the generated code (code inside the *.g.cs files) since those are created during the compilation phase. You will not see those code in your project and, therefore, you will not be able to manually enter the pragma disable statement into the code even if you want to go with this hideous way.

Fortunately, the feature "AfterTargets" introduced in MSBuild 4.0 comes to rescue. Delving into the investigation, it shows that the Workflow Activity auto-generated code (*.gs.c files) are created inside the build target "XamlMarkupCompilePass1". By leveraging the "AfterTargets", we can inject our code to disable those XML Comment warnings caused inside the generated code with the following target in the project file

  <Target Name="XamlGeneratedCodeWarningRemoved" AfterTargets="XamlMarkupCompilePass1">
    <Exec Command="for %%f in (@(XamlGeneratedCodeFiles)) do echo #pragma warning disable > %%f.temp" />
    <Exec Command="for %%f in (@(XamlGeneratedCodeFiles)) do type %%f >> %%f.temp" />
    <Exec Command="for %%f in (@(XamlGeneratedCodeFiles)) do copy /y %%f.temp %%f" />
    <Message Text="XamlGeneratedCodeWarningRemoved: @(XamlGeneratedCodeFiles)" />
  </Target>


The job of the above target is to insert the "#pragma warning disable" statement into the auto-generated code to by pass the XML Comment warnings (as well as other warnings in those generated code).

So, that's it. Problem solved!