I'm involved in a project with many others companies. We started to develop our systems at the same time but only at the end the communication problem was taken into account.
I've developed my system on Linux with Mono (Linux is mandatory for me). I have to communicate with a Windows .Net system which is exposing a Wcf web services. Unfortunately they told me only now they are using wsHttpBinding and I've just discovered that this communication protocol is not supported by Mono.
I'm here to ask if there is a way to communicate with that web service. They are not going to change the wsHttpBinding because is used by many other companies. I cannot change my OS and my code base is too big to leave Mono now. I can only add a layer (always on Linux) between my Mono implementation and their web services.
Any suggestions?
Microsoft has recently released the .NET source code as MIT licence (open source).
This means that, if something is not supported by Mono, you can just bring the code yourself and incorporate it, so that it becomes officially supported.
Some Mono developers have actually been doing this the past weeks to incorporate things that they had not implemented yet. So you could bring the wsHttpBinding along to Mono. An example of such a change is this commit.
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i'm about to decide on technology choices for an agent based application used in the transportaion systems domain.
basically there will be a central system hosting the backend, and multiple agents located across town (installed on desktops) that communicate with devices/kiosks collecting data and then transmitting them back to the central server. the central server could also be hosted on the cloud.
following are important
securing the data and communications between the device and the agent
and the agent and central server.
agents should be easily installable with little or no configuration.
near 100% uptime and availability
Does WCF fit the bill here?
if so what binding types should i go for? netTCP or wsHttp with SSL/HTTPS?
WCF is definitely a fit choice for this kind of scenario. For your bindings, the actual question is what technology you are going to use. Do you want to make the agents run in a non .NET environment like Java, then you should chose for wsHttpBinding. This binding communicates through SOAP and is very interoperable.
If you chose to use .NET agents, you might as well use netTcpBinding because they use the same WCF frameworks. It also supports binary encoding. If you really need to make a choice, take a look at the MSDN Documentation.
For your agents you could use a simple console application that runs in the background as a Windows service. WIX can help you with that (install an application as windows service), but thats all I know. WIX can also help you with basic installing and configure everything for you but it has a high learning curve so you might need to invest time in it.
Can anyone point me to a WCF Self-Hosted NetTCP example that works on Monotouch? I've searched for many hours and have come up with nothing.
I need nettcp for speed reasons (I'm transferring a lot of data between an iPad and an XP machine). And I would much prefer self-hosting rather than using IIS to keep things simple.
Many thanks in advance!
MonoTouch does not support NetTcpBinding. MonoTouch supports the same bindings that are available in the Silverlight 3 Client Profile, which is limited to BasicHttpBinding.
Mono WCF implementation is open source (just like the rest of Mono itself). You can, and some people do, include their own (not the MonoTouch versions) assemblies into their applications. That allows them to use some features not available in the Silverlight subset.
However this is not a simple "add source and recompile" scenario. Honestly there are many other technologies available (and well tested/supported) that could likely fit your requirements. I would have a long look at them before investing many hours into providing your own assemblies.
I need a way to exchange data between a process and a windows service.
The process (Windows Form Application, Console Application, in the future also a Web Solution) needs to instruct and interact with the windows service.
I want to know which way is the best to accompplish this.
I'll write the solution in C#, .NET Framework version does not matter.
In the past I've used Remoting (Activator), WCF Interface with Contracts, Inter Process Exchange IPC and some named pipe implementation. What is your experience? Other ways?
I would choose WCF. It is most modern and probably best supported approach at the moment. It "replaced" older technologies in most scenarios. Nice feature of the WCF is that if you need to move your service to other protocol you can do that simply in configuration.
If you expect that windows service will always run on the same machine as other application you can use WCF with netNamedBinding. If you decide to move your service to other machine you will have to change configuration (probably to netTcpBinding) because Named pipes in WCF are limited only to IPC.
My previous experiences have always been over an IPCChannel, mainly because the only code I've had to be involved in that does any form of inter-process communication. It's never caused me any problems and the code is working away quite merrily as I type.
The only real answer to this question is, whichever you're most comfortable with.
Is Mono appropriate for developing server applications, or only desktop applications? I'd like to develop server applications in C# for Linux. I want to write a First Person Shooter (FPS) game in C#/XNA, and I've a Linux dedicated server. But this question is generally for all types of server applications...
Mono handles ASP.NET (including ASP.NET MVC) quite well. Most other server implementations work very well, as well. It does depend, slightly, on what exactly you are trying to serve, and how you are going to use it.
Mono also supports WCF directly in the core, which allows most non-web service applications to be written very effectively.
Edit:
Given your edit, and your desire to handle the server side of a multi-player FPS game, Mono should work fine. You will likely want to avoid using the high level interfaces like WCF and ASP.NET, and go straight to the System.Net namespace (depends a bit on how many players you'll be synchronizing, but if it's large, you'll want speed here over ease). Mono supports this quite well.
That being said, Mono's support of the System.Net namespace is very good, and quite mature, so you should have no problems using it for the server side of a multiplayer FPS game.
I don't see why not. I believe FogBugz uses Mono to deploy to apache servers.
Here is a conversation about running the FogBugz application on mono as an example of having a server app running on it.
It looks like your needs cover a broad range of different applications.
I think the overall answer would be yes, Mono is appropriate for developer server applications.
As others have pointed out, Mono has ASP.NET support as well as WCF built-in.
You also have the ability of working directly down to the Socket level if you need to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your server application (although you'll have to figure out how to persist state if the need is there).
I'd definitely be interested in seeing the performance difference of something like that between the two platforms (I wouldn't expect much difference...it's possible that Mono might even get slightly better performance because of the rest of the *NIX stack).
What is a better platform/language for developing Windows/desktop based application that can run offline (sometimes)? .NET (C#, ASP) or Java or any other development tool? This application requires to store data into a database(involves some GIS) and later Synch both ways with the main server (SQL/Oracle) during off hours or when initiated by a user or event or when online? ALso the tool/IDE recommended should allow us in the future to migrate this desktop application as a Web based application to the corporate server with less pain or re-work when internet/nw access is available to all of our remote sites/users. Any input/advice is appreciated.
If you are strictly doing Windows desktop application development, C# or VB.NET would be an excellent choice. There is a ton of documentation out there for .NET developers. Although the framework is a free download from Microsoft, any serious work is cumbersome and tedious without the IDE.
If you needed the potential to support your application on multiple operating systems besides Microsoft Windows, then I think it might be worth looking into Java.
For web solutions, in .NET you have ASP.NET, Java you have JSP and Tomcat.
You could try Adobe AIR. It seems like it would serve most of your desktop needs and it should be the easiest to migrate into a web app (Flex).
C#/WPF for desktop with Silverlight, XBAP or even ASP as the online options.
Since you mentioned the desire to web-enable this application at some point I'd look into Silverlight. Out-of-browser capabilities were introduced in Silverlight 3. That means that the app can run directly on the desktop, and the internet connection is optional. However, when the internet connection is available it has built-in support for auto-updating itself.
And now in Silverlight 4 it's possible to run an out-of-browser Silverlight app with elevated trust. Silverlight 4 also finally introduced things like right-click support, clipboard access, full keyboard support in fullscreen mode, etc. So if you're just now starting development, I'd most definitely use version 4.
You'll have to communicate with something like a WCF service for a lot of the database operations. But going with Silverlight should allow you to build something that'll work on the desktop and the web alike without having to manage two systems.
Going web-based after you already developed a desktop application is a really bad idea. There is no reason the desktop application cannot use a internet connection, and be updated from a server.
You could try Delphi. It's a rapid application development tool. Very different, but very quick to use. Well suited to Oracle integration. Data sync is probably going to need to be custom, unless you're using something like Sybase SQL Anywhere.