Motivations and Requirements for the Jokes Web Service

• Internet based applications have to be universally accessible; on a technical level, this means they should work well with corporate firewalls, and on a user level, they have to support an international audience. Both can be achieved by employing Web Service technology.

Functional Application Design

• Security, state management, and error handling are critical elements of application architecture that need to be considered first.

Implementing the Jokes Data Repository

• Visual Studio.NET includes a fully working copy of Microsoft s SQL Server Desktop Engine.

• Visual Studio.NET s Server Explorer lets you interface with data repositories such as Microsoft SQL Server, including both reading and writing database schemas and data.

• Starting the application development process by implementing the back-end first is usually a good idea.

Implementing the Jokes Middle Tier

• Visual Studio.NET continues in the tradition of the Visual Studio product line in being a very comfortable and efficient environment for application development.

• It is often a good idea to extend the System.Exception class to add custom error handling mechanisms, such as additional logging functionality.

• When throwing a new exception in a Web Service context the .NET runtime will automatically send a SOAP Fault back to the client application.

• The .NET Framework allows you to extend SOAP Faults to include custom XML elements, such as user friendly status or error information.

• Web Service security can either be implemented using the standard ASP.NET security mechanisms, or using a custom authentication and authorization scheme.