James Skemp's StrivingLife

I know I should know them better so I've been looking into WCF Web services, with a heavy lean towards an implementation based on REST principles.

After a good deal of research, where it was highly suggested that while ASP.NET MVC may make sense, WCF is still the way to go for Web services, I stumbled upon WCF WebHttp Services, which uses functionality released in .NET 4.

After a painless install via Visual Studio 2010's Extension Manager (more information), and troubleshooting a stupid mistake on my end, I was able to quickly create a Web service that uses an assembly I had created to parse one of my iTunes Playlists to Xml files and return a listing of tracks for a particular artist.

I am more than a little disappointed that it took months for me to find this, but the flexibility it allows, and the joy of working with it, makes up for it almost entirely.

Updates

10:04 P.M.: See also WCF Web HTTP Programming Model.

Yesterday Slate posted an article by Farhad Manjoo titled The Digital Download Is Dead: How Google's music-streaming venture will change the gadget and entertainment worlds forever.

After first, rightly, attacking Apple's iTunes and iPod (and related) platforms as being slow and unwieldy, especially on the predominate operating system Windows (not even mentioning Linux), and overall behind on the times, Farhad moves us from syncing our music collections out to the cloud. Which isn't much of a surprise given that, despite some rather large issues, the cloud has been 'in' for a couple of years now. But even more surprising Farhad argues at the end of the article that "[i]n the future, not only will you not get a CD when you buy an album, you won't even get a digital file."

But there's an elephant in the room. A rather large one, taking up every available inch of space. Namely the global music industry.

At the moment I'm listening to X Japan. If I do a search for this band I find the following:

• Amazon MP3: Two albums available - Blue Blood and Jealousy.
• Amazon music: 236 results, seemingly with most of their releases covered (but I wasn't about to page through all those results). Of special note is the magical word 'Import' next to the majority of the albums.
• iTunes: Same two albums as Amazon MP3 and the I.V. Single.

There's better examples, I just happened to be listening to X Japan at the moment. Go ahead and look up some popular European bands and see if you can find their music on Amazon or iTunes, or any one of the other online sellers of music (for the United States). Chances are you'll find a good deal of music that you can't purchase, unless you're willing to pay import prices for a physical CD.

Now with this in mind, Farhad expects physical media to disappear, in the future. In lieu of an extremely ambigious timeframe, let's substitute that with 'in the next 5 years' or 'in the next decade.' With the music industry as slow as it is, do we expect not only for the industry to move to the cloud, but to also deal with the 'import' situtation in a respectable way?

Instead of moving away from digital downloads, which by the way work better (for me) than a cloud service - and service it will be, with the associated recurring costs - I'd much rather the industry finish show that they're willing to embrace digital media and its promise. As things stand now they haven't embraced digital media, and won't until everything (give or take) that's available in physical form is available digitally.

Now if you want to move to the cloud at that point, or alongside the expansion of digital downloads, fine. Go right ahead. Other groups have certainly tried, but until the global market elephant is removed from the room, any new services will run into the exact same issue.

And until we see 'foreign' music available digitally to 'all,' please don't suggest we get rid of physical media, or the issues now will just get pushed to the cloud.

Side note: the gaming industry

A similar debate is going on in the gaming industry. Digital downloads of games is finally becoming more and more prevelant, not only with DLC, but the making of 'classic' games available for purchase and download, whether that be through the Playstation Store, Xbox Live, or Good Old Games (GOG.com). They too are looking at cloud-based services, but they too have an issue with imports.

Progress is moving forward, not stepping to the side, and until the promise of digital media/downloads is embraced, anything based on it will suffer the same issues.

While I've already read Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 by Imar Spaanjaars and moved rather far beyond it, when I had the opportunity to recieve his new book on ASP.NET 4 for review, I took it.

Would I still feel strongly about recommending his work as *the* #1 choice for those new (or relatively new) to ASP.NET? Would it offer enough new content over the previous iteration that I'd recommend a new purchase if someone had the first?

===

First, if you're just getting started with ASP.NET, this is once again *the* book to start with. The way the book reads makes it extremely easy to keep up with where he's at, and why. At the end you'll end up with a functional site, having built it yourself, using a good deal of ASP.NET functionality.

The book also assumes little experience with HTML and CSS, which makes this book a fairly good start for anyone who wants to get started with creating Web sites (using ASP.NET), even going into the developer tool Visual Web Developer 2010.

The book itself is a *vast* improvement over previous iterations, with a much more solid wrap and softer (but still thick) pages. (Although the pages must be somewhat thinner, since the previous iteration of this book is about the same depth as this one, even though this has ~70 more pages.)

The guitar on the cover has left me guessing a bit, all the way from 'rock star' to 'hero' to 'he creates a music-related site' but if you don't get stuck on such things, you'll be fine.

===

If you've purchased and read the previous iteration of this book, Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, you might be wondering if it makes sense to pick this up.

The only new chapter is one on jQuery (although Microsoft AJAX is still covered and used as before), and it's primarily an introduction, which fits within the context of this book. Crawling the jQuery site for a little while will probably get you up to speed just as well. Otherwise, the rest has been updated to ASP.NET 4 and the current versions of software; little else has changed.

If you picked up the previous iteration and couldn't get through it, then don't bother with this, as it's quite similar. Likewise for if you've moved beyond Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, and feel comfortable with the technology; ASP.NET 4 isn't dug into so much here that you can't get the information elsewhere with some basic searching.

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To conclude, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB is *the* book I *highly* recommend to get started with ASP.NET (3.5 or 4). Imar knows the technology as well as how to teach it, from beginning to Web site created. 5 of 5 stars.