WCF duplex channel for inter-process communication - wcf

I have system like this:
Windows service (WCF, data/events) <-> Web app <-> Web client
I need simultaneous response for clients requests. I have some events from service for clients too. So duplex channel is the way to go. But I need high throughput, because clients calls simultaneously.
Request/reply approach
In order not to serialize channel requests I need more channels for parallel calls, right? But how to handle callback channel then? Ho to keep it still open for receiving events, even on channel errors?
OneWay approach
On channel should be enough (no waiting for data preparation), but how to link data sent to callback with original request, to be able to compose response for client?
What is the way to go? Thank you.

In a simple case, when a web client sends a request to the web app, and web app (possibly) sends a request(s) to WCF service, there's no need in duplex binding at all.
As for events, raised by the service to be fired in Web client, I'd suggest to use a message broker which supports WebSockets - for example RabbitMQ. It has a plugin compatible with WebSockets and WCF binding.
Putting things together, one can create a RabbitMQ server, which accepts messages from WCF service and sends it to Web client, which subscribes to the event feed from Javascript.

Related

NServiceBus, WCF Architecture

So I'm looking into implementing NServiceBus in our current setup and just trying to get a better understanding of how things should be setup.
Our current setup consists of multiple clients (websites, scheduled tasks, etc..) calling a WCF service we have set up for handling the sending of emails. Of course, if the service goes down then our clients start getting errors and all of those messages are then lost (one of the reasons we want an ESB).
I've seen how you can configure your WCF service to handle nservicebus messages in a pub/sub setup. What I'm not sure on is what is the best way to set it up.
Setup 1:
Client (Publisher) -> NServiceBus handler (Subscriber) -> WCF Service
In this case, to scale you'd increase the number of handlers (hosted nservicebus services?), keeping just the one WCF service.
Setup 2:
Client (Publisher) -> WCF Service (Subscriber)
This one you just increase the number of WCF services to scale (updates would be a nightmare).
I just started looking into the ESB architecture in general so if I'm completely off let me know. I'm essentially just wanting to know what is working for you, and what the "best practice" tends to be.
Thanks!
I'm not completely clear on what you need WCF for anymore if you implement this via NServiceBus. Is the WCF component required for anything besides receiving messages (to send an email) from the multiple clients? If not, you could remove WCF from the equation.
From the sound of it, you will also want the Service to act as a single logical endpoint that handle requests to send emails. If that's the case, you will want to use Send (a command) instead of Publish (an event). Publish is used to broadcast an event, which means that something happened already; Send is used to instruct another component to do something. It sounds like you want the latter.
Scaling of an endpoint can be done via the Distributor. This may or may not be useful depending on where you expect the bottleneck to be.
Edit: Based on your comment, I would simply go with the second setup, and just add the handler to the WCF service. If you are hosting WCF in IIS, make sure you have something that wakes the process up if the app pool recycles (the incoming message won't wake it up the same way an incoming request to WCF will).
We do something similar internally where one NSB endpoint handles all the sending of email. The clients can either use NSB directly to Bus.Send() the command to send a message to the email endpoint or you can expose that endpoint via WCF as well (only to get the commands over to the endpoint). Once the endpoint has the commands, they would just call your existing service to maintain compatibility with your existing clients.

WCF service to queue all request

I have a wcf service and handle a lot of client (server document generation). This service should receive a lot of request and should be handle in queue. It also have a callback. (callback will return successfully generated document). I am still using PIA and will implement OpenXML in the future.
Is it wcf msmq is the way to implement this?
Is there any samples might be related? Previously its running in local machine but now want to change it as a so called "Server generated"
WCF MSMQ doesn't support callback directly - it supports only one-way operations. But for example this article discuss how to add this support. With default configuration you can send message back to original sender but it is not a callback. To support responses every client will have to expose queue and pass address of its queue as part of the request to be able to receive the message from the service. More about responses in MSMQ is in MSDN magazine.

Duplex WCF service channels continuously alive (WSDualHttpBinding)

The arhitecture:
console application that contains a wcf duplex service;
windows app consumers; every app subscribe to Duplex, so we have a list of subscribers
and the service must send notifications to some of them in case that some events apper;
The problem:
how to maintain the connection alive continuously so that the service can send notifications to clients ?
I found that there are 2 channels for this binding. I need to have permanently the channel from service (for callbacks) open.
Thanks;
I had the same problem than you, to solve it you need to implement a keep alive method. A dummy call to your service is kind of stupid to have a 24/7 WCF service because is not really the best architecture way of WCF but we know sometimes what we need is not always the best thing.
So yep, just implement a call to the WCF service every 5 minutes and by doing that you keep alive the connection. Maybe you can have others problems too, in my case I don't have a lot of subscribers of the WCF service so this solution was fine.
As long as a client is connected to the service, the callback channel will be alive. Once the client disconnects (or the channel gets faulted), the callback channel will close.

Can I listen to a WCF event from a web client?

Can I listen to a WCF event from a web client? Is this possible? I am not talking about call backs, I want the WCF service to raise and event and the web client to be able to listen. Is there a good example of this in C#?
There are no events in WCF. If you want mimic event you still have to call some operation exposed on all clients = you must call WCF service or callback exposed on client.
What do you mean by web client? Do you mean javascript code running in web browser? In such case no you can't achieve that with WCF. You can only use AJAX calls from borowser and continuously poll the service for possible "event".
If you mean ASP.NET application then the answer is theoretically yes, practiacally it will be pretty hard. The reason is that in ASP.NET you handle only current HTTP request by some handler - for example Page. The lifetime of the handler is only for serving the single request. Due to that using duplex service doesn't make to much sense because for receiving callbacks by duplex service your client proxy must live. If you open the proxy in Page it will die after serving the request. If you open the proxy in separate thread you must somehow corelate incomming callbacks to actual client but the client still have to poll the web server to be notified about callbacks. Similar situation will be with exposing the service on ASP.NET application.
Difference between asynchronnous and duplex calls is big. In asynchronnous pattern single request always have single response. Resonse is not sent without request. In duplex pattern you can make single request and receive thousands callback from server.

Is NServiceBus suitable for general as well specific client notifications

I am looking at various options for a WCF based publish subscribe framework. Say I have one WCF web service that will be the publisher and 1000 clients registered as subscriber. For some published messages all clients will be interested but at the same time I wish the ability to notify a single client with a specific message. On receiving notification the client will call other web service methods on the web service.
Is NServiceBus suitable for this kind of scenario ?
If I use MSMQ for transport does it mean that every PC where the client is installed requires a queue to be created ?
Some of the challenges include how you want the publisher to behave when a given subscribing client is down - do you want that message to be available when the subscriber comes back up? If so, then some kind of durable messaging is needed between them - like MSMQ.
Your question about notifying a single client, is that as a result of a request sent by that client? If so, then standard NServiceBus calls in the form of Bus.Reply will do it for you. When using WCF, if the response is to be asynchronous you'll need to use callback contracts.
NServiceBus can do all the things you described, and has the ability to automatically install MSMQ and create queues so that greatly simplifies client-side deployments.
You also have the ability with NServiceBus to expose messages over WCF so you can support non-NServiceBus clients if you need to as well. It also has its own http gateway and XSD schemas which can allow clients on non-Windows platforms to interoperate even without using WCF.
Hope that answers your questions.