Need a plumber?

Sometimes with all the glittering IDE's and the Autocomplete features in our development tools, its easy to forget that those too, are just (or have been) someone else's software project and are as such subject to the same deadlines, feature creeps and illogical decisions that our own projects sometimes experience.

Therefore, no matter how shiny a tool may be, always remember that it may have its own logic and ideosyncracies underneath. Because you don't know (and you probably don't *want* to know) what happened in the development lifecycle. Also, most products are really a hodge-podge of various other technologies, some of which were written by 3rd parties, and I'm sure had questionable documentation ;)

Self-proclaimed software guru Joel Spolsky called it the "Law of Leaky Abstractions" in one of his essays and that a pretty good analogy.

We recently met one of those leaky abstractions, in the follow-up of a BizTalk project in which a client had some encoding troubles consuming a .NET webservice from his PHP webserver. In the course of investigating the problem, we traced it all the way from a File Pickup port through an Orchestration schedule, to the Send Port and finally up to the (generated) webservice itself. Having determined that all of the previous steps didn't help in resolving the problem, we then went about the process to change the encoding in the webservice itself (even though its a less-than-optimal solution, because Biztalk regenerates that webservice when you deploy).

So we edited the Web.Config of the webservice, and changed the following line:
<globalization requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8"/>
to
<globalization requestEncoding="utf-16" responseEncoding="utf-16"/>

Save web.config, refresh the webservice client, look at the results.
And absolutely nothing changed...

When even a IISReset didn't help the problem (programmer's superstition...), we did some more research and suddenly found this:
http://weblogs.asp.net/tmarman/archive/2004/02/02/66476.aspx

So change that globalization tag all you want, change the encoding by other means, pin needles in a voodoo doll, its just not going to work, because apparently ASMX's are hardcoded to UTF-8...

Make sure you also read the first comment on this blogentry, as its apparently from some Microsoft employee who was involved in the process. ;)

So remember this when next time you wonder why a piece of software doesn't what you wanted. There's probably a leak somewhere ;)