I am using a WCF web service client to send and receive SOAP messages from a non-WCF web service. I want to control timeouts but really confused by the different timeout settings presented on MSDN.
Is there a simple list of settings for a WCF client (regardless of the server--where I know if server has shorter timeouts they will rule!)? Does it matter by binding or contract (XmlSerizalizer or MessageContact) type?
Have you seen: Timeouts WCF Services? I think that particular question/answer fits what you are looking for.
I am working on a web application which acts like a Devicemanager. Clients can register with the devicemanager and connect to the devices that the manager provides.
I was thinking of using a duplex WCF service for the device connection/disconnection.
Is WCF the correct technology to use?
I will need the clients to be constantly registered to be able to connect/disconnect.
Duplex WCF service implements callback function in web services world.
With callback client sends request to server with some kind of reference to its own method that should be called by server when time came. This allows server to communicate with client when server think it is necessary.
You situation contains no need for callback implementation because process is always controlled by client:
Clients can register with the devicemanager
Clients can connect to the devices that the manager provides
So answer for Duplex is NO (if my understanding of your question is correct)
Should you use WCF – YES.
WCF is right technology if you want to set up communication channel between two applications and TCP/IP is too low level for your needs.
I am currently developing a WCF duplex Service for 2 clients. The first client would be an asp.net webpage which upon receiving a posting, it will send the data over to the service. When the service receives the data, it will then AUTOMATICALLY send it to the second client which is a winform app through the callback channel...
To make it simpler.
Asp.net will invoke the wcf
The wcf will reside on the iis server, same as the asp.net
WCF will require to send a data to the windows form application that is running on a client side. Only 1 instance of this application will be run at a time.
Your service should know nothing about the clients attached to it. Doing so pretty much breaks the intention of WCF.
A better solution might be to have your clients subscribe to "events" that your service can fire off. Or maybe the client can provide some information in their requests that indicates a service and method to call back to when needed.
I'm reading into WCF and Service Bus topics, but I don't get the use of Service Bus in some topics. Check this image of the use of Service Bus:
http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/learn/Azure/Labs/IntroServiceBus/Lab.html/html/images/4a0aa8f8-f4d1-49b6-b950-cf954402c599.png
In above image Your Service is behind a firewall, and then you apparently need a Service Bus. But if you want to expose Your Service, isn't the solution to simply remove the firewall? And then every client can connect to Your Service.
I understand that you don't want to remove the firewall for your total network, but you can create a publicly visible webserver with IIS and run Your Service on that. Or am I missing something?
A service Bus helps you enhance your services architecture.
Many organizations have what is refereed to as point to point or spaghetti integration.
This is not good.
A service bus would help you have a single point of integration. e.g. in the image you linked (The Azure Service BUS architecture), by adding the service to the ESB you can unify service authentication using Access Control even if they sit behind a firewall instead of each service being responsible for authenticating itself. Further , even if the address of the service changed you would only have to change it in one place (the ESB) instead of all the applications that reference it.
A service bus can do many other things including validating services messages, enhancing them in case they don't meet your requirements, transforming them e.g from plain old XML to SOAP , routing messages, enhancing messages etc.
WCF is a way of setting up and managing communication interfaces. It cares not for the content of your messages.
A service bus, however, is different in that it's responsible for message routing.
You can build a service bus using WCF and other bits, but WCF in and of itself isn't a service bus.
Service Bus is a relay service so all clients will point in the cloud. Hackers will attack relay service in the cloud rather than your WCF service. All security aspects taken care by relay service.
To precisely answer your question, not all WCF services are hosted on service bus and your solution may be just sufficient. It depends on your need and existing infrastructure.
I highly recommend Juval Lowy's this article.
Excerpt from the article:
The relay service is a service residing in the cloud, whose job is to assist in the connectivity, relaying the client calls to the service. Such a relay solution does require both the client and the service intranets to allow connections to the cloud, but since the cloud constitutes neutral territory for both the client and the service, most environments allow calls out to the Internet. First, both the service and the client must establish connections and authenticate against the relay service. At this point, the relay also records where the service is and how to best call back to it. When the client calls the relay service, the relay service forwards the call (the client message) to the service. While the sequence seems straightforward, in practice it involves a considerable amount of intricate network programming, messaging and standards know-how, security expertise, and more. Such a solution is simply out of reach for the vast majority of applications. This is exactly the gap the Microsoft .NET Service Bus is designed to fill. It is a ready-made relay service, hosted and managed at a Microsoft data center. The .NET Service Bus acts as a perimeter network in the cloud, providing a single place to manage credentials of the client and services. The .NET Service Bus is the front end of the service; it encapsulates and isolates the service from malicious callers lurking on the Internet and is responsible for repelling various attacks from denial-of-service to replay attacks, while obscuring the identity and true location of the actual service.
The main difference between connecting to a regular Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service and using the relay service revolves around hosting. In the relayed case, the service must connect to the .NET Service Bus, authenticate itself, and listen to calls from the relay service before the client sends its requests. This means that you either must launch the host explicitly or use an NT Service as a host, and that you cannot benefit from hosting in Windows Activation Service (WAS) (or IIS) since WAS will launch the host only after the first request comes in, and that will never happen because the host has not connected to the .NET Service Bus in the first place.
The .NET Service Bus supports a WCF-friendly programming model by offering a set of dedicated bindings and behaviors. By and large, except for a few slight twists to the programming model, working with the relay service is no different than working with any other WCF service. The .NET Service Bus supports the core WCF features of reliable messaging, message security, and transport security.
I have a callback service that is hosted over wsDualHttpBinding. I'm looking to add a client that will poll for the data rather than receive the callback (will be a mobile device using wince for demo purposes). I was curious what the best way to do this is? You cannot create a client proxy using NetCFSvcUtil with a service hosted with wsDualHttpBinding (I understand that), but you cannot host a callback service over basicHttpBinding. I really need the same service hosted over both basicaHttpBinding (clients will poll for data) and wsDualHttpBinding (callback will notify clients of data). Any ideas on the best way to handle this without creating two separate services to host the same data?
What do you mean by two separate services hosting the same data? Do you expect to share same service instance to handle both wsDualHttpBinding and basicHttpBinding requests?
Your current problem is that service interface for duplex communication cannot be used for basicHttpBinding. You have to create second service contract and implement it in the same service. In that case you can expose two endpoints for the service: one duplex with WSDualHttpBinding and one with BasicHttpBinding. Endpoints must have different relative addresses. From the perspective of the client those endpoints are separate services - each of them requires separate client proxy. So unless your service is singleton you will have new service instance for each client proxy. New service instance means no data sharing.
Thera are some possibilities to modify this behavior but it means replacing Instance provider.