DotNetKicks.com - Stories tagged with wcf

Calling a WCF service from a client without having the contract

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:50:24 GMT

I was asked yesterday in the Hebrew C#/.NET Framework MSDN forums a tough question - is it possible to dynamically call a WCF service using only the contract name, operation name, and metadata address? The short answer is - YES! To see how, check out the code in the blog post.

WCF/ASMX Interoperability - Removing the Annoying xxxSpecified when Ad

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:01:45 GMT

WCF/ASMX Interoperability - Removing the Annoying xxxSpecified when Adding a Web Reference to a WCF Service Today I answered a question in the MSDN forums about consuming WCF from a .NET 2 client, using the "Add Web Reference" option of Visual Studio. Apparently adding a web reference to a WCF service can cause the method signatures on the client side to look different. In this post I explain why that is and how to fix it.

Improve WCF services testability with simple Dependency Injection

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:05:04 GMT

Dependency injection is a great technique to reduce coupling between components and improve testability. Manually injected dependencies are dependencies which are passed manually to an object's constructor. When using WCF we depend on the WCF run time to create new instances of our service class. This solution provides a way to easily control service class instantiation for any type of WCF service

WCF Client Proxy Creation Process

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:48:32 GMT

WCF enables us to consume a service in 2 ways: adding a service reference or by creating the proxy yourself. Both methods do the same thing - create a proxy class and and using it with the channel factory. Both cases are good, and its a matter of preference which one you use. I tend to use the second one - I prefer creating my proxy and add reference to the service dlls in the consuming app.

Introducing Unity.WCF providing easy IoC integration for WCF services

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:55:18 GMT

There are numerous blog posts available that explain how to hook up Unity with WCF. Unfortunately, many of these are incomplete, too basic or just plain wrong. Additionally, as far as I can tell, nobody has created a NuGet package to get you up and running as quickly as possible. This post introduces Unity.WCF, an open source NuGet package that (hopefully) just works in most situations, deals with cleaning up IDisposable instances and also provides a nice mechanism for automatically adding WCF behaviors to your services.

What's new in WCF 4.5? Improved streaming in IIS hosting

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:00:53 GMT

What's new in WCF 4.5? Improved streaming in IIS hosting As promised in my previous post, I'm continuing my mission to inform you of new changes in WCF 4.5. If you've ever tried creating a WCF service that uses streamed requests (for example a file upload service) and host it in IIS, you may have noticed a strange behavior in your WCF service - it would seem that WCF is late in receiving the request, as if it was entirely loaded into the memory, and then passed to WCF. So is it streamed? or is it actually buffered? well, it's both. This is the ninth post in the WCF 4.5 series. This post continues the previous posts on web-hosting features, and this time it is about the improved streaming capabilities of WCF 4.5 when it is hosted in IIS.

How to NOT store user credentials in a database

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:38:02 GMT

Sometimes you need to create an application with your own role and user management module. In most cases you are creating it in a simple and understandable way. That way the user information with a password is stored in the database in the same table named User. In this post I will show you why this solution is not safe, why you should omit such structures and how to fix them.

Validating WCF services with System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotions

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:26:27 GMT

All WCF services operations need some level of parameter validation to ensure that the data passed to the operation is present and correct. Two popular methods are manual checking and the Validation Application Block (VAB) from Enterprise Library. This article discusses another option - using the validation features from System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.

WCF Web API - Making REST a First-Class WCF Citizen

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:36:07 GMT

Applications are continually evolving to expose their functionality over the web for example social services like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. Aside from social applications, organizations are also looking to surface their core enterprise business functionality to an ever expanding array of client platforms. WCF Web API allows developers to expose their applications, data and services to the web directly over HTTP. This allows developers to fully harness the richness of the HTTP as an application layer protocol. Applications can communicate with a very broad set of clients whether they be browsers, mobile devices, desktop applications or other backend services. They can also take advantage of the caching and proxy infrastructure of the web through providing proper control and entity headers. We are designing specifically to support applications built with a RESTful architecture style though it does not force developers to use REST. The benefits of REST for your applications include discoverability, evolvability and scalability.

Host a WCF service with SSL and self issued certificate

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:33:04 GMT

When you use SSL for your WCF service it is really useful to be able to work with self issue certificates for dev machine.

Basics of WCF Security

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:59:54 GMT

In last edition of Basics of WCF Security series, we discussed ProtectionLevel Security Setting in WCF. Today's WCF corner is a continuation on the same topic. As usual, this article assumes that you have a fair understanding of basics of WCF and you have at least written or seen a simple WCF application in action.

RESTful WCF Service for Windows phone

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:37:35 GMT

The post explains how to develop a RESTful WCF service. Some configuration has to be done so that the RESTful service is available from Windows phone.

Load Balancing & Reverse Proxying WCF OData Services

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:28:24 GMT

This article discusses rewriting WCF OData Services to correct errors in XML and using load balancing & reverse proxy.

Creating a WCF 4 dynamic locator service using discovery extensions

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:59:28 GMT

An article about how to extend the wcf discovery mechanism to also include binding data.

What's new in WCF 4.5? Changed default for ASP.NET compatibility mode

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:06:17 GMT

This is the eighth post in the WCF 4.5 series. This post continues the previous posts on web-hosting features. This post is about the ASP.NET compatibility mode default change of WCF 4.5.

Making Sense with Data Contract (Structural Contract)

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:24:04 GMT

One of the confusing aspects of learning data contract is that WCF offering multiple approaches to define data contract.

Impersonation and Delegation in WCF

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:37:07 GMT

Impersonation is a technique that WCF Services use to authorize the caller's identity to access to service resources such as files and database tables. Service resources can be located either on local service machine or remotely hosted. The resources are being accessed by WCF Service's process identity or specific windows identity.

WCF web api + developer APi keys

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:53:16 GMT

If you are familiar with using REST style API calls to other websites providing private keys then you might find this article of some interest. The author integrates some common methods in with WCF to create some interesting code to manage the API calls.

How to choose right WCF binding?

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:28:12 GMT

Binding in WCF defines how clients can connect with your service. The base class for all bindings in WCF is System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding. A Binding includes definition for WS-* protocols used, the message encoding and the transport protocol.

Transport and Message Security in WCF

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 06:15:35 GMT

This post discusses about transport and message security. In Transport Security user credentials and claims are passed using transport layer. The transport protocols are TCP, HTTP, MSMQ and IPC. Each of these protocols have their own mechanism for passing user credentials. The most common approach is using secure socket layer(SSL) for encrypting the details which sent over HTTPS.

Using StructureMap with WCF Web API

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:49:29 GMT

Sample how to use StructureMap as you IOC container with WCF Web API

My WCF Session at VS Live 2011 Redmond

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:32:02 GMT

Yesterday I had my WCF 4 session in VS Live, where I showed some of the new features of WCF 4, including: - Configuration simplification - IIS hosting features - WebHttp improvements - Routing and Discovery services I also talked about some other new WCF 4 features such as the DataContractResolver type, the new ReceiveContext API for MSMQ bindings, Monitoring WCF with ETW and PerfMon, the new binary stream encoder, and the new throttling defaults. Slides and samples are available for download.

Using Geospatial Data -- WCF Data Services Team Blog

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:10:06 GMT

The WCF Data Services Team introduces the new support for geospatial data and querying in their latest CTP release. The blog post describes the new feature and guides us through an example of how to create and query such a service.

Introducing the OData Library

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:22:02 GMT

Shayne Burgess discusses the new standalone OData library included as a part of the latest CTP release of the WCF Data Services, looking at using the library to read and write data. (Courtesy of The Morning Brew.)

Basics of WCF Security - Part 2

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 03:00:32 GMT

In last First Article of Basics of WCF Security series, we discussed Core Security Concepts, Transport and Message level security basics and started discussion about Security Settings in WCF. As usual, this article assumes that you have a fair understanding of basics of WCF and you have at least written or seen a simple WCF application in action. To refresh it, following is the list of available security settings in WCF