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Server did not recognize the value of HTTP Header SOAPAction

Seeing as nowhere on the internet can I find an explanation of this error I thought I’d share the fruits of my long search for this bug.

It means (at least in my case) that you are accessing a web service with SOAP and passing a SOAPAction parameter in the HTTP request that does not match what the service is expecting.

I got in a pickle because we moved a web service from one server to another and thus I changed the “namespace” (don’t get confused between web service namespaces and .net namespaces) in the calling C# file to match the new server. But the server doesn’t care about the actual web reality of http://yournamespace.com/blah it only cares that you send it what you have said you are expecting on the server. It doesn’t care if there’s actually anything there or not.

So basically the web service was moved from http://foo.com/servicename to http://bar.com/servicename but the “namespace” of the web service stayed as http://foo.com/servicename because no one changed it.

And that only took about 4 hours to work out!

If you’re having a similar problem but can’t work what I’m saying here, feel free to mail me on bakert+web@gmail.com – I wouldn’t wish my four hours on anyone!

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Unit Testing for .Net

Had to take over a medium-size ASP.NET application at work and so I’m writing unit tests in the excellent, idiomatically translated NUnit, a port of the brilliant JUnit. I’m using Visual Studio 2003 and thus framework 1.1 which means I needed this fix to use NUnit with .Net framework 1.1

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WASTE

“WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.“

“WASTE is designed to enable small companies and small teams within larger companies to easily communicate and collaborate in a secure and efficient fashion, independent of physical network topology.”

WASTE also seems to have created a permanent rift between programmer Justin Frankel (one of the authors of WinAmp and his employer Nullsoft (owned by AOL Time Warner) who pulled it. Here is my mirror of WASTE

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Donald E. Knuth Rules

He hasn’t had an email address since 1990 and he wrote one of the 12 most significant scientific monographs of the 20th century. He rules.
This isn’t news but in case you haven’t seen it here is the classic Knuth (Ka-NOOTH) quote:

On March 22, 1977, as I was drafting Section 7.1 of The Art of Computer Programming, I read four papers by Peter van Emde Boas that turned out to be more appropriate for Chapter 8 than Chapter 7. I wrote a five-page memo entitled “Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion,” and sent it to Peter on March 29 (with copies also to Bob Tarjan and John Hopcroft). The final sentence was this: “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”