herveyw points to some fundamental changes in WSE 2.0, since the technology preview, in how messages are send and recieved.

When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.

Software should be transparent in the way that it fails, as well as in normal operation. It's best when software can cope with unexpected conditions by adapting to them, but the worst kinds of bugs are those in which the repair doesn't succeed and the problem quietly causes corruption that doesn't show up until much later.

Therefore, write your software to cope with incorrect inputs and its own execution errors as gracefully as possible. But when it cannot, make it fail in a way that makes diagnosis of the problem as easy as possible.

Words to live by.

[scribbling.net]

Finally SQL reporting services has been released. This is a very nice tool for creating reports: interactive, webbased or paperbased.

edit: available on MSDN Subscriber downloads.

Joel Spolsky and Johanna Rothman both have a great advice when sending resumes and cover letters.

Joel suggest you read the resume and coverletter, you're about to send, a couple of hunderd times and Johanna suggests you organize your jobsearch.

[ No, I'm not looking for a new job at the moment. ]

Gus blogs about C# compiler testing and the different tests used to show succes and expected failure.

Encrypt a set of name/value pairs into a single string, which can make passing them in a querystring a little safer. Not that you can trust anything coming from a user, but every little bit helps.

Korby Parnell gives us a peak of the new version of SourceSafe, which will be released with Whidbey (hopefully) by the end of 2004.

[coolbits.nu]

Two interesting books, both to be published in the near future:

1. Code complete, 2d Ed.
2. Coder to developer

Order them through RSS4C.

Udi Dahan has a number of interesting posts about designing a service oriented application and a link to a nice implementation on GotDotNet.

• I'll see you when you get there.
• What's persistence got to do with it ?
• Shadowfax v3 (SOA mplementation sample)

One of my favorite new features in Whidbey has an MSDN TV episode dedicated to it.

The best part about MSBuild (PDC presentation) is the ability to build your own tasks, or leech them of other developers.

The episode isn't on the official MSDN TV site yet, but the downloadable version is available.