Microsoft.NET Norman White Stern School of Business

Agenda What is.NET SOAP UDDI WSDL CLR

What is.NET? Simply put, it is Microsoft’s solution to the market demand for “WEB Services” –I.e. services that can be hosted and accessed anywhere on the web Web Services encompass –SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol –XML eXtensible Markup Language –UDDI – Universal Description, Discovery and Integration –WSDL – Web Services Description Language All Web Services run over standard web protocols –I.e. http,SSl, HTTPS …

WEB Services Promise… Ability to distribute applications anywhere on the Web Services can be changed / updated without touching the calling application Should dramatically increase ease of implementing B2B applications

SOAP S imple O bject A ccess P rotocol –Allows movement of data defined by XML –Describes a message and how it should be treated –Has rules for relating data in an application to data in a database –Has a framework for developing processes and procedures that can run on one system while calling data from another –Can run over lower level protocols like HTTP Allows.NET to talk to.NET and other web services

U DDI Universal Description, Discovery and Integration Use SOAP and XML to define ways for applications to find out about the existence and capabilities of other applications Should speed up interactions that use SOAP and XML

WSDL Web Services Description Language Does for web services what XML does for data –Defines services and describes ways of invoking them –Provides a complete description of a service,its location (I.e address,port), and a list of operations available.

What was the problem? Early Microsoft web technologies focused around Active Server Pages (ASP) ASP has problems –Interpreted (performance) –Not truly object oriented (no inheritance etc.) –Not really structured code –Hard to maintain –Competition has better tools (JSP,J2EE) etc.

Solution,.NET Complete redesign, with all tools running on a Common Language Runtime (CLR), similar (VERY) to the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in functionality. CLR hides OS from applications, supports multi language development, Much cleaner architecture

CLR- more than runtime support CLR incorporates –Security –Intermediate language compilation to native code (on intel) –Traditional run time support functions File opening OS interface etc.

CLR Features Common data types across all languages Standard interface calls Every program includes meta data about itself, so it is “self-describing” Programs can be run without being “installed”. DLL hell is gone. –The program has imbedded info on “EXACTLY” what components it needs. (I.e particular version of DLL (Dynamic Link Library) component.

Other.NET additions New language –C# (C Sharp) VERY similar to Java but designed for Microsoft environment ASP.NET –New (different ) version of ASP –Generates compiled version of pages automatically (like JSP) in CIL (Common Intermediate Language) –C# now supported as a scripting language

Convergence We are seeing some convergence between the two (new) competing technologies for web services, I.e. JSP and.NET Two approaches should interoperate, (but probably with some limitations).NET approach much more encompassing than JSP due to inclusion of ADO, CLR and other features.NET can (theoretically) be ported to other operating systems…. (already runs on all Windows OSes, but depends on IIS facilities)

Some Differences between JSP and.NET.NETJ2EE C# MS onlyJava run anywhere.NET common Components (XML, SOAP) JAVA core API ADO integrated with SOAP etc.JDBc, RMI etc. up to developer Many Languages (C#,VB,C++, etc.) Java only One IDE (Visual Studio)Many Tight integration between components Loose integration using CORBA, ORB

Management Takeaway.NET is significant direction for MS Typical “Embrace and Extend” philosophy of Gates In theory, fixes many of the complaints about the IIS, ASP development environment Strong contender against JSP et al., more tightly integrated Makes developing distributed WEB applications even easier in MS environment Also provides future base for non-web applications without DLLs.. What happens if you PORT CLR to UNIX? –MONO project at Simian

NEWS FLASH November 2005 Microsoft offers new versions of –SQLServer – SQL server 2005 –Visual Studio 2005 –Web Services exposed directly from SQL Server –Data Analysis and Mining built in to SQL Server