IT Techno Update

Developing Webservices in ASP.NET is now less complex, thanks goes to tools like Visual Studio .NET, Visual Studio 2005 which reduce the over head of manually creating the proxy files and schema.

We can invoke a service by opening URL in browser as <YourServiceName>.asmx and trying to invoke the webmethods available, from the local machine.

Usually the service lies on a different machine other than the machine where the application which consumes the service, resides.

If you will invoke services from other machine, by default, it will give message “The test form is only available for requests from the local machine.”

To enable the Service to be invoked from remote machine, we need to add the following settings to the Web.Config file of the Web Service Application.

<system.web>
<webServices>
<protocols>
<add name=”HttpGet”/>
<add name=”HttpPost”/>
</protocols>
</webServices>
</system.web>

This will enable the Web service to be able to invoked from remote machine. However, make a note that this invoking would work only for simple data types and would not work in the case of complex datatypes.
Similarly, this setting would only be useful in development / testing scenarios and it is advisable to remove / comment the above section when releasing for production, due to security reasons.

Happy Web Servicing !!!

If you want to redirect all non-www requests to your site to the www version, all you need to do is add the following code in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect any requests to http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com. There are benefits from doing that:

* It will avoid duplicate content in Google
* It will avoid the possibility of split page rank and/or split link popularity (inbound links).
* It’s nicer, and more consistent.

Please make sure that if your site has already been indexed by Google without the www, this might cause unwanted side effects, like lost of PR. I don’t think this would happen, or in any case it would be a temporary issue (we are doing a permanent redirect, 301, so Google should transfer all rankings to the www site). But anyway, use at your own risk !

Another nice way of writing .htaccess is code above is that you can use it for any website, since it doesn’t include the actual domain name.
Redirecting www to non-www

If you want to do www to non-www, the code is very similar:
in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^mysite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In this case we are explicitly typing the domain name.

I’m sure it is possible to do it in a generic way same as above, but I haven’t had the time to work one out. So remember to change ‘mysite’ with your domain name!, and I’m keeping this post open for all my readers to comment on it and post generic code for www to non-www redirection.