What’s new in WCF 4.5? UDP transport support

home
wcf
view story

3 Kicks

What’s new in WCF 4.5? UDP transport support(blogs.microsoft.co.il)

submitted by idof(307) 3 months, 12 days ago

This is the tenth post in the WCF 4.5 series. I’ve started this series of posts 4 months ago when .NET 4.5 developer preview was announced; The Beta/RC/RTM version is still to come, but hopefully it will be available soon, and you will be able to use the new WCF 4.5 features in your projects. Until now, I’ve shown new features in configuration easiness and hosting improvements. In this post and the next one I will cover new transport features, starting with the support for UDP transport.

4 comments |category: WCF |Views: 150
Tweet

tags: WCF another

Everyones tags:

Your Tags:

Please login or signup.

Add a live kick counter to your blog >> liveImage

You can even customize the image by choosing your own colors, and then clicking the button below to update the preview and the html code:

"Kick It" text
"Kick It" background
kick count text
kick count background
border

Simply copy and paste this HTML into your blog post.

Users who kicked this story:

pwhe23(972) -

dpeterson(4397) -

idof(307)

Comments:

posted by dpeterson(4397) 3 months, 11 days ago 0

I wonder what sort of recovery/retransmission logic it's using when UDP transport is active, if any. Is the assumption that if you're using UDP, you don't care about packet loss?

posted by idof(307) replied to dpeterson(4397), 3 months, 11 days ago 0

As far as I know UDP means uni-directional, meaning you don't know of packet losses.
(backed up by wikipedia: Protocols such as UDP provide no recovery for lost packets. Applications that use UDP are expected to define their own mechanisms for handling packet loss.)

Regarding to how WCF handles this situation I don't know, but I will try to find out.

posted by dpeterson(4397) 3 months, 11 days ago 0

Sorry, I know that UDP doesn't know about packet loss, but at the application level it's common to have some mechanism in place to detect when transmission errors have occurred.

For instance, let's pretend I'm going to multicast a file to several clients, I might send a checksum first so that the applications can check that the download completely successfully and request retransmission if it doesn't match. As a trade-off, I might send an expected content-length and send the file in chunks so that if I need to retransmit I only need to retransmit that chunk, rather than the whole file. This avoids the amount of overhead present in TCP, but still provides some failure recovery.

I was curious if WCF implements any sort of similar mechanism to detect transmission errors. Thanks for looking into it.

posted by idof(307) replied to dpeterson(4397), 3 months, 9 days ago 0

According to my sources at MS, the implementation of the UDP binding uses the transport "as-is" without handling packet loss.
My assumption is if there is a packet loss your service will have some sort of an encoder/serializer internal exception.

Most Active Users

What's this?