First Web Service ,XSLT XML Transform

Worked on my first Web Service today, wasn’t much of a complex web service but I got some idea about WebServices and their working.
Was a simulation of a XML returned by a third party tool retrieving records from DB2,
The objective involved getting rid of the extra nodes (data) returned in the XML from the 3rd party and just passing on the XML data recognised by the consumer application as a valid object.This was achieved by making my transformer app sit in between the Webservice and the consumer app.

The best option in this case was transforming the XML output from the 3rd party tool into XML recognised by the consumer application using XSLT as it allowed us to change the nodes (data) passed on to the consumer app by just changing the XLS file and not recompiling the whole of the transformer app (incase we had written a custom class to take care of parsing the output XML and returning only selected number of fields).

Will post a code snippet on the transformation code a bit later.Now I am almost done with the Cruisenet Doc ,will be posting that in a while here (by tomorrow most probably) and ofcourse the Nant and Nunit doc need to be completed and posted too 🙂

 

MSIL Disassembler (Ildasm.exe) Assembly version over write problem

Faced a weird problem the other day ,I had changed some references in my project and while compiling I got an error of cannot copy XXXXXX.dll of version 1.0.3 into the output directory since it would overwrite the preexisting assembly ver 1.6.2.
Didn’t know what the exact problem was but knew that the problem could have arisen by the compiler trying to copy the older version assembly in the bin folder containing the new version dll but how could that be possible since I had just 1 reference of the assembly in my project so there was no 2nd reference in the picture at all.

Using ILDAsm tool in the Tools provided by .NET helped me understand what the problem was and the resolution to it.

Using the ILDAsm.exe I opened each assembly in the bin folder to gauge where the root of the problem was Thanks to the ILDAsm tool I realized that in one of the helper assemblies there was a reference to the other version of the assembly that was causing the problem. Hence to solve the problem corrected the version of the assembly being referenced and recompiled the project.

Conclusion :- Looking at the tools provided by .Net and using them helped solve the problem faster than it would have normally taken!

My New Blog

 

Sending Meeting Request programmatically

Getting that Meeting request object assembly that I wrote to work was the easy part , making it configurable with a web application was the headache.

To keep the consumer trasnperant from the internals of how I am creating the meeting request through code and sending it to the attendee needed a heck of time especially since I needed the current working directory for temporary storage of the ICalendar file.
Hence tried out the Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() method to get the CWD from the system but instead got c:\windows\system32. that’s right you read it right “c:\windows\system32”
Was baffled by the result and googled a bit searching here and there for the answer to the mysterious result.
and was thinking abt the connection between the returned directory and my application when it struck me
my project was an Web Application and hence it was being executed by the ASPnet_WP.exe which inturn was being created by Inetinfo.Exe (IIS) which resides in the path and hence the return path.

Moral of the story :- Analyse the situation before looking for solution