Richard Naszcyniec's Blog

Lately I have been knee deep designing, coding, and now testing a web service infrastructure that acts as a mediator between systems.  Basically, the server allows systems that comply to a certain companies standards communicate using such with a system that can't comply with those standards.  Technically this boils down to message transformation and handling of things that appear in the SOAP header like WS-Security.  However, that is whole different discussion.

Testing became a big issue to me on this project since I knew many people with varying skills needed to be involved in tests.  One test in particular was required for a home grown file transfer  web service.  For large files , the web service requires "chunking" of data over the wire.  So a large file of say 1MB might be sent in ten 100k chunks.  This required programming a test  client to break up a file and exercise the web service.  I started using both Java and C# to create my clients.  Much to my surprise I found that coding was faster using Visual Studio and C# to create the client.  Not only did the user interface work go faster, but the C# code generated from the WSDL respected the facets on elements.  More and more I encourage the use of facets in XSD's to try and sharply define data.  Therefore, it is really useful to see a code generator that recognizes them and respects them. 

I find it amusing that I embrace Microsoft technology as a path of least resistance to leverage standards.