Microsoft changing to a services company

For those of you following Microsoft and Windows 8 might have noticed a shift in the way that the company does things. Microsoft has moved from the “Ship it and Forget it” model to one of continuous iteration, online or or out-of-band releases.
This is more like what Google does since most of its products are online anyway.
This is more evident in the Office365 products, where the releases are hidden from the user, and new functions and features can be updated on the website and Visual Studio with NuGet being the main vehicle of delivery (especially for MVC). Windows 8 has the app store where an application can be updated through the common Marketplace mechanism rather than each app having an update button.
This implies that Microsoft has moved away from its traditional model of software products in a box or online to a pay a subscription for a service model, and that is a bold move for a company that has relied on traditional products.

Expect this to be more evident in Windows 9, and the OS is slowly evolving from a traditional installed piece of desktop software (ala Windows 8 Pro) to a more open and dynamic system (ala Windows 8 RT that relies on Javascript), and this also be the case for the products from them. It will be interesting how vendors of audio products like Ableton or FL studio will work and play ball with the concept. They already have the concept of VST plug-ins, so this is nothing new to them.

 

Testing Services with Fiddler

When we write web services, we need ways to test them.
Instead of writing an elaborate harness or using curl or wget or some other tool, I discovered that Fiddler can be used to invoke SOAP services, with either a GET or a POST. Fiddler is a great, free tool you might already be using to monitor net traffic. If not, I would highly recommend it.

To use Fiddler to test you service that accepts a POST of param1, here is a quick rundown:

Start Fiddler and go to the Request Builder tab.

In this tab, enter your service path.
Note: you can run Visual Studio and grab the (dynamic Cassini) address from there.

Choose the submit type aka verb

For a POST type, we have to specify the Header to contain additional info.
viz. Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

 

 

Enter the various parameters to submit to the service in the Request bodyfield.

e.g. for 2 params, with value1 and 2

 

Hit the Execute button (in the far top-right) to submit the Request.

I usually choose Tear Off in the Options so that I have a nice little floating window to do my testing.

You can put a debug point in VS and step through the Request if you want.