Thoughts on .Net
If you're one of the handful of people who read my blog, then you probably noticed that I've been all over the map lately. Reporting Services, SharePoint, and now BizTalk. This is due to the work I've been doing at Countrywide. It has been a lot of fun to learn all these new technologies.
Now I'm no expert on these new technologies, but it seems like they have been fairly easy to pick up. I was reflecting on this last night as I was sleeping. I came to the conclusion that the reason it has been pretty easy to learn these technologies is because they are .Net based and integrate with Visual Studio. So now that I'm becoming proficient in .Net, it has become easier to pickup these new .Net based technologies.
Don't believe me? Think back to the VB6 days (not too long ago). I remember going through the VB6 Win32 API tutorial. It seemed like each new technology that came out you had to dig through the SDK to even begin to understand the product and even then you probably would still get the calls wrong. Maybe it's just gotten easier because I've been doing this longer, but maybe .Net is making a difference.
Now we just need Yukon Beta 2 to be released so we can see how much of a difference it makes having .Net in the database...
Update: Just reading Overview of Native XML for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and thinking that even though you can create HTTP Endpoints without using .Net, they are still easier to understand because of .Net. .Net made web services (and HTTP Endpoints for that matter) something the average developer has a basic understanding of.
Also the article states that “SQL Server 2005–native Web services require Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 as the operating system, because they rely on the kernel mode http driver http.sys that this version provides”. But after reading Don Box's comment on XPSP2 about HTTP.SYS I'm wondering if you could run this on XPSP2. Maybe it is the “kernel mode” that XPSP2 doesn't support. Anywho, the CREATE HTTP ENDPOINT format looks somewhat similar to Indigo's self-host syntax.