Fun book about AI - "Final Jeopardy"

An interesting computer science read: "Final Jeopardy" by Stephen Baker. It's an account of IBM's massive project to build Watson, the computer system that defeated two human champions on the game show "Jeopardy." My key takeaway is that there are two approaches to artificial intelligence, and they're both hard.

You can simulate human-like reasoning with something like a neural network -- hard because it requires vast processing power

Or you can "teach" a computer system myriad rules and bits of information -- hard because it requires lots of people to spend lots of time.

Console app to send a SOAP request

For troubleshooting purposes, it can be useful to invoke a web service method by sending an XML-formatted SOAP request and receiving the response. Here's a C# console application to do that. Just replace the URL and the XML request string with your own values.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace post
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// Replace with the URL of your web service.
string strUrl = "http://oosapi/OosApiService.asmx";

// Replace with the XML-formatted SOAP request for the web service method you wish to call.
// Don't forget to escape any double quotes.
string strRequest = @"b5a3e821-6f7d-4ad0-b5d0-b723222bc319";

// Create the Request object.
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(strUrl);
req.Method = "POST";
req.ContentType = "text/xml";
req.ContentLength = strRequest.Length;

// Send the request.
StreamWriter swRequest = new StreamWriter(req.GetRequestStream(), System.Text.Encoding.ASCII);
swRequest.Write(strRequest);
swRequest.Close();

// Receive the response.
StreamReader srResponse = new StreamReader(req.GetResponse().GetResponseStream());
string strResponse = srResponse.ReadToEnd();
srResponse.Close();

// Output the response.
Console.WriteLine(strResponse);
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
}