Connecting Applications with Windows Communication Foundation

Brian Noyes www.idesign.net

2008 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc. All rights reserved

About Brian
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Chief Architect, IDesign Inc. (www.idesign.net) Microsoft Regional Director / MVP Publishing l Developing Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation, LiveLessons training DVD, June 2007. l Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce, Addison Wesley, January 2007 l Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0, Addison Wesley, January 2006 l MSDN Magazine, MSDN Online, CoDe Magazine, The Server Side .NET, asp.netPRO, Visual Studio Magazine Speaking l Microsoft TechEd US, Europe, Malaysia, Visual Studio Connections, DevTeach, INETA Speakers Bureau, MSDN Webcasts Participates in Microsoft Design Reviews E-mail: brian.noyes@idesign.net Blog: http://briannoyes.net

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

Agenda
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Connected Systems Concerns WCF Overview WCF ABCs and Es Defining Services Connecting Clients Passing Data Advanced Capabilities

Connected Systems in a SO World

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Need to connect clients to back-end services Need to connect services to other services Need to be decoupled from the specific service technology / calling patterns Need support for distributed system capabilities: l Service hosting l Instance management l Reliability l Async communications l Transactions l Security

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

SOA Tenets
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Service boundaries are explicit Services are described by policy Services expose contract and schema, not types Services are autonomous

What if Im not doing SOA?

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If your application is composed of more than one process, you still need a remoting technology WCF is the best available remoting technology even if you are just doing client/server, point-to-point communication

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

Agenda
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Connected Systems Concerns WCF Overview WCF ABCs and Es Defining Services Connecting Clients Passing Data Advanced Capabilities

WCF Overview
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Framework for connecting distributed applications Part of .NET 3.0 and later Enables building SOA applications Implements WS-* standards Single API that supports the capabilities of: l .NET Remoting l ASP.NET Web Services l Enterprise Services (COM+) l MSMQ

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

WCF Overview
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Messaging subsystem at its core l SOAP messages

Does

not necessarily mean XML/Text!

Interoperability with: l Enterprise Services l ASMX / Web Services 1.0 services l Any WS-* compliant web service l MSMQ applications

WCF Value Proposition

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Simplicity l On par with other remoting technologies if you just need simple remote calls l Incrementally more complex as you start to take advantage of more complex features

Features which the other technologies may not have

Flexibility l You can change your mind about wire level communication protocols, security model, and many other facets without changing your source code Maintainability l One API for all forms of remote communication, dont need to learn multiple technology stacks Power l All the capabilities of other remoting APIs rolled into one l Interoperability and SOA enabled in ways the other technologies never considered

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

Agenda
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Connected Systems Concerns WCF Overview WCF ABCs and Es Defining Services Connecting Clients Passing Data Advanced Capabilities

WCF ABCs and Es

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Clients and services communicate through Endpoints

Client

Service
Endpoint

Endpoint

Message

Endpoint

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

WCF ABCs and Es

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Enpoints are composed of Address, Binding, Contract

Client
A C B A B B

Service
C C

Message

Address
(Where)

Binding
(How)

Contract
(What)

WCF Addresses
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Location of the service URL l Protocol l Server/domain l Port l Service URI (optional) Examples: l http://myappserver:2112/ l http://my.service.domain.com/SomeServiceURI l net.tcp://myappserver:2112/SomeServiceURI

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

WCF Bindings
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The brains of the communications Encapsulates what happens on the wire l Wire level protocol l Communication patterns l Message format l Security l Transactions l Reliability Can all be extracted out of code and put in config

WCF Bindings
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WCF defines several standard bindings l Basic l TCP l Peer TCP l Named Pipe l WS Many variation bindings l Context, Dual, Federation, etc Can customize standard bindings Can define custom bindings

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

WCF Contracts
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Service Contracts l Operations exposed by the service Data Contracts l What data is passed through the service operations Message Contracts l What the message looks like when serialized Fault Contracts l What error messages look like

Agenda
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Connected Systems Concerns WCF Overview WCF ABCs and Es Defining Services Connecting Clients Passing Data Advanced Capabilities

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

Defining Services
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Define a Service Contract l .NET interface l [ServiceContract] attribute on the type l [OperationContract] attribute on the operations (methods)

Defining Services
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Implement a service types l Implements service contract interface l Does not require any WCF specifics for basic communication l Add [ServiceBehavior] attribute with properties for special communication patterns
Timeouts, instancing, concurrency, transactions

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Agenda
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Connected Systems Concerns WCF Overview WCF ABCs and Es Defining Services Connecting Clients Passing Data Advanced Capabilities

Connecting Clients
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Need a WCF proxy on the client l Generate

svcutil.exe Add Service

Reference in VS Code gen (snippets, CodeRush, CodeSmith)

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Dynamically create
ChannelFactory<T> class

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Proxy exposes service contract methods Create instance of proxy, call methods

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Agenda
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Connected Systems Concerns WCF Overview WCF ABCs and Es Defining Services Connecting Clients Passing Data Advanced Capabilities

Passing Data
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Based on Data Contracts .NET primitives work out-of-box l Serializable Any serializable type by default XmlSerializable types if you change the formatter Best practice: l Define data contracts for custom types used in the service contract
[DataContract] attribute on [DataMember] attribute on

the entity type the properties you want to be contained in

the data transfered

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Agenda
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Connected Systems Concerns WCF Overview WCF ABCs and Es Defining Services Connecting Clients Passing Data Advanced Capabilities

Advanced Capabilities
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Asynchronous calls Callbacks Sessions Security Reliability Queuing Transactions Peer to Peer

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Asynchronous calls
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Service calls can: l Take a long time l Be one-way l Call back into client l Be re-entrant Need to make calls asynchronously Handle completion / error handling Display results in UI l Completion events/callbacks on background thread

Asynchronous Calls
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Manual Async Calls l Delegate based l BeginXXX/EndXXX method variants

Svcutil /a switch OperationContract.AsyncPattern =
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true

Register callback method Gets called on background thread, must marshal results yourself to UI thread (ISynchronizeInvoke)

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Callbacks
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Service can call client l Events Need to register client callback contract on service l ServiceContract.CallbackContract Need to obtain callback channel instance in service l OperationContext.GetCallbackChannel<T> Callbacks happen asynchronously from client perspective

Sessions
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Often service calls are related to one another l Start Order l Add Order Items l Submit Order Individual service calls are just messages l Underlying protocol does not support sessions Need to relate multiple messages together Sessions are maintained through shared service instances on service side NOTE: Session is the default instancing mode NOTE: Sessions are BAD for scalability NOTE: Sessions get messy with transactions / web farms / etc.

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Security
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Three kinds: Transport, Message, Mixed Must match the requirements of the service Credentials: l Windows l X.509 l Username/password l Cardspace Message integrity / confidentiality l SSL l WS-Security Authorization l .NET Role-based security l PrincipalPermission / IsInRole

Reliability
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Reliable transports l TCP l IPC WCF reliability deals with message reliability Enables order delivery assurance Reliability is controlled in the binding l Supported/not supported l Enabled/disabled

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Reliability
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Reliability not supported l Basic binding l Peer TCP binding l MSMQ/MSMQ integration binding Reliability always enabled l WS dual binding Reliability disabled by default but can be enabled l TCP binding l WS binding Reliable by definition while not using WCF reliability l Named pipes

Queuing
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Message queuing technologies allow communications that are: l Asynchronous l One way l Buffered l Disconnected Great for submit types of operations where you dont need immediate feedback in the client of service side processing

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Queued Calls
MSMQ Queue Proxy
MSMQ Message

Dispatcher

Client

Service

MSMQ Channel Listener

Dispatcher

Service

Client Initiated Transactions

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Indigo transactions built on top of System.Transactions + WS-* Initiate a transaction in client code Transaction is flowed to all services called that support transactions

using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope()) { // Call Service1 transaction flowed to service1 // Call Service2 transaction flowed to service2 scope.Complete(); } // All commit or all rollback

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Enabling Transactions
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Transactions do not flow by default Requirements: l Enclose service calls in transaction scope on client l transactionFlow = true on binding l [TransactionFlow] attribute on service contract methods

Optional specify transaction scoping options TransactionFlowRequired = true TransactionAutoComplete = true

OperationBehavior attribute on service methods

Peer-to-Peer Communications
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No true multicast in V1 Each client is a also service Must call every other (interested) client directly Can simulate with duplex channels Can use PeerChannel

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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Resources
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Programming WCF, Juval Lowy, OReilly & Associates. Learning WCF, Michele Leroux Bustamante, OReilly & Associates. IDesign WCF Master Class, www.idesign.net. IDesign articles: http://www.idesign.net/idesign/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=1&tabid=9 WCF Dev Site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/wcf

E-mail: brian.noyes@idesign.net Blog: http://briannoyes.net

2007 Brian Noyes, IDesign Inc All Rights Reserved

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