Thom Robbins

One of the key ideas behind the .NET strategy is the concept of software as a service, or in short, Web Services. This session will explain what a Web service is and provide an overview of its related technologies like XML, SOAP, and UDDI. We will demonstrate how the .NET Framework makes it easy to implement them for new and existing applications. This session will also provide concrete best practices for building XML Web services using Visual Studio.NET. We'll answer many common questions like: How will my Web service scale? How can my XML Web services enable interoperability with Web services from other vendors as well as within my own organization? We'll delve into building highly reliable and secure Web services. Also, we will discuss issues such as dealing with complex data types using WSDL (Web Services Description Language), as well as securing SOAP messages ... (more)

Introducing Microsoft InfoPath 2003, Part 1

A few weeks ago I was meeting with the CIO of a local health care customer and his IT staff. They were explaining the various technology initiatives and projects that were occurring over the next year. What the CIO was the most proud of was that he had declared this a year of integration projects. He had followed the IT trends closely and was seeing that now was the time to ride the Web services wave. With the release of Visual Studio .NET and Windows Server 2003 he felt comfortable in the platform. He and his staff were focused almost exclusively on the development and deployment... (more)

INETA's Topic Choice: Introducing SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services

Recently I was part of a project team that was completing a .NET design session for the rewrite of several existing business systems. We had just spent a very grueling two days documenting, designing, and arguing over every possible piece of application architecture and feature request we could think of. It appeared that the session was starting to wind down when one of the business analysts stood up and announced that the only remaining questions he had were around the 300 existing reports and the additional 75 new ones that the business had requested. Everyone in the room groan... (more)

Managing XML Data

Last week I had lunch with the application manager of a local customer that just completed their enterprise rollout of Office 2003. We had decided to meet and discuss possible ways his team could begin to utilize this deployment. As we sat down he explained that he had been talking to his team and had been investigating a project that he wanted to discuss. He explained that they had a variety of independent business processes that all ran within various Microsoft Office applications. He wanted to know if it were possible to connect these together using XML and the features of Off... (more)

Introducing ASP 2.0 Master Pages

While meeting with the development staff of a local company we began discussing a project that the CIO had assigned them earlier that morning. The project was actually the first in a series of about 15 planned Web sites scheduled over the next year. Each site was designed to expose sales and marketing collateral to their international reseller community. Their lead developer explained that the first site would contain about a hundred pages, but when complete they expected each site to have several thousand distinct pages. He said, "Layout control and reusability are key for this ... (more)