Web Services becoming Generic?

I read a post by Udi Dahan titled, "Generic Web Services Evolution." It is an interesting take on what is still lacking in Web Services (rich messaging...pub/sub). Structurally, web services have different roots and therefore were not made to do things such as pub/sub, but there are ugly ways to emulate that environment. One such way would be to make an async call to a "publisher" web service. If that times out, recall it. If it responds, take appropriate action. Like I said, not pretty, but would it do the trick?

Always More to Learn

My latest deep-diving has been on the SqlCacheDependency class in System.Web.Caching. It is the first time I've messed with caching at the web service level to handle lookups to SQL Server. Luckily, I'm using SQL Server 2005, so I should be able to bypass some of the older methods of hooking into the updates. Mainly, it appears the Service Broker in SQL Server handles most of the work. Nice!

We'll see how the wire-up goes. So far, it's a bit confusing on how to lazy load the cache with specific pieces of information. I'll post more later.