[ILUG] Re: [ILUG-Social] GNOME to "embrace & extend" .NET !

[Kenn Humborg]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 02:03:02PM +0100, Padraig Brady wrote:
> I think everyone should adopt .NET and not go off designing
> something different. To me .NET is required as the (RPC)
> transports used by COM/CORBA required loads of open
> ports and also connections in both directions which are impossible
> really to adequately firewall. All the info is now nicely spit over an
> XML stream which does require more CPU processing than the
> binary RPC protocols but everyone has loads of that. I don't
> see any disadvantage for easing the interoperability between
> logic on various systems. Also it fits more easily with the Unix
> philosophy of cohesive lumps of logic connected with text
> streams, in my opinion.

Ahh, that's what I thought too, until I got a bit of a rude 
awakening on reading the latest VB Programmers Journal.  There
was an example of a .NET object running as a Web Service
returning a chunk of XML to a client after a method call.
Unfortunately, the required quoting make it almost illegible.
Something like (never mind the actual tags I'm using here):

   <?XML ....>
   <RESULT TYPE=STRING>
         &lt;name&gt;Fred&lt;/name&gt;
         &lt;id&gt;1234&lt;/id&gt;
   </RESULT>
   </XML>

Now, if the would only define a special data type for returning
XML (and assuming they could deal with the namespace issues
involved), then they should stop passing XML as strings with
all this ugly, hard-to-read quoting.

Later,
Kenn