I was at Jinnah University for Women (JUW) last weekend, talking about basic ASP.NET. The session went good, the audience were good and I got only one question in the Q&A session. I think they either understood everything or most probably nothing :) . I told the participants that I will share a couple of links on the mailing lists but due to my work load, I am unable to to spend much time on net. Anyways if anyone of you is still waiting for the links then please send a reminder to our INETA Pakistan mailing list with your querry. I'll definately reply over there. You can download the slides from here.

What is .NET Pakistan

.Net Pakistan will initially be a blogging site that will evolve as a .NET Portal and a discussion forum. At .NET Pakistan you will be getting daily dose of technology updates, code snippets, tutorials, best practices, and solutions for their posted problems.

Blogging at .Net Pakistan will be done by experienced .Net Professionals from around the globe. The list of bloggers will increase with time. If you are interested in blogging for us then do write us at (dotnetpakistan@yahoo.com) about your self, experience, and areas you would like to write on.

Behind .Net Pakistan

Wajahat Abbas has worked for the last three years as a Software Engineer. He is currently working as Technical Lead in Kalsoft (Pvt) Ltd, Pakistan, a software consulting firm focused on .NET development and consulting. Wajahat is an Executive committee member of INETA Pakistan. He has also worked for Microsoft Consulting Services for .NET development. He can be approached at wajahatabbas@yahoo.com. For more details visit his blog : http://www.wajahatabbas.com.

Hammad Rajjoub is a Software Engineer by profession. He is a Microsoft MVP for XML Web Services. He is also a MCP. He has been working on .Net platform since its beta release. He is also an Executive INETA committee member and member of INETA MEA speakers bureau. He is currently working as Technical Lead in Kalsoft (Pvt) Ltd, Pakistan, a software consulting firm focused on .NET development and consulting. Hammad has spoken at a number of seminars and conferences. He can be reached at hammad.rajjoub@ineta.org. For more details visit his blog : http://dotnetwizards.blogspot.com.

Where is .NET Pakistan

Right here : http://www.dotnetpakistan.com

A group known as The Committee to Fight Microsoft says it has has "begun a campaign to block Microsoft Corporation from releasing Windows Vista to the general public unless and until Microsoft offers a general and unconditional warranty to purchasers that the program does not include 'bad code.' "

Windows 95 was a disaster; it took three years to correct the major deficiencies. But the 95 fix, Windows 98, only created new vulnerabilities, and required yet another round of fixes for Windows 98. On and on it goes. No other company in America gets away with selling defective products and then expecting its customers to wait years for proper product pperability.

Josh Meier of Ars Technica offers an alternate view in this post:

Windows 95 certainly had its share of problems, and Windows 98 even saw a Second Edition, but to call them flat out defective is going a tad far. While Windows 95 made the term "BSOD" commonplace, it achieved a number of milestones. It brought preemptive multitasking and protected memory to the mainstream market years before Apple, while maintaining backwards compatibility with 16-bit Windows applications, and even most DOS programs.

Source: News.com Extra

With a sudden increase in awareness about the terms "web services", "WSDL", "XML" and "SOAP", to name a few, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of curious people who want to know what all the fuss is all about. Today's most popular search engine, Google, exposes its search application programming interface (API) through a Web service, giving Web developers the oppertunity to utilise such search capabilities within their applications. E-commerce giants such as Amazon and eBay also expose their product catalogues and search facilities via Web services. So what is the hype all about?

Web services, in the general meaning of the term, are services offered by one application to other applications via the World Wide Web. Clients of these services can aggregate them to form an end-user application, enable business transactions, or create new Web services. Utilities of this kind are built according to Extensible Markup Language (XML), simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specifications. They are prevelent and portable, covering every operating system and programming language. These standards provide the foundation for application integration and aggregation that companies are starting to use in order to create solutions and improve the usefulness and ineroperability of their applications.

This is an excerpt from my article published in Spider August 2005 issue. You can read the rest of this article "Understanding the architecture and facilities of Web services" on page 57 of the magazine. Some contents of the magazine are available for online viewing.

Visit Spider website here.