Wcf Domain Service vs Silverlight Enabled Wcf services - wcf

I am working with silverlight project that is consuming domain services. Actually i find that quite messy as one domain service class and metadata. I have already worked with Wcf services and found them very easy to update and handle. But domain service's modification (as new field or tables are added) is really a pain.
I want to know why people prefer domain services over silverlight enabled Wcf services? I mean advantages or disadvantages of both and performance implication

After goggling i found this are things you should see :
To authenticate users faster in the domain
To authenticate resources(gps etc) faster for the users
Utilization of resources
Utilization of network and descreasing the overall traffic in the
network.
The main benefit is that of the users and passwords management, which
could grow to be massive amount of work having to manage them
individually on each independent servers. The proposed changes of
migrating the whole platform to Active Directory environment will
assist in propagating the changes (such as new users, password
changes, new security requirements via GPO, etc) on to the servers
(which will run as domain clients, only 1 or 2 will run Primary and
Secondary ADC. Not all these servers are going to run host AD or be
an ADC, server OS is used due to it's robustness and reliability).
disadvantage
cost of infrastructure
good planning is must
Complex structure for user

Related

What is the difference between WCF and Azure Function?

I cannot understand the difference between WCF (service oriented) , and Azure Function or AWS lambda ( FaaS). It seems to me both are invoking remote functions, while WCF has a host. but what is the technical difference between them?
WCF or the Windows Communication Foundation, is another framework, this time for writing and consuming services. These are either web services, or other, e.g. TCP based services, even MSMQ based services. This is, in my opinion, what you should be looking at for exposing your back-end. WCF provides you the ability to easily specify a contract and implementation, while leaving the hosting of the service and the instantiation to IIS (IIS being Microsoft's web server, which is also running under the covers on Azure).
Azure, towards you, is a hosting provider. It helps you scale your application servers based on demand (e.g. number of mobile clients downloading & installing your application).
A little marketing speak: Azure lowers your cost of ownership for your own solutions because it takes away the initial investment in firstly figuring out (guessing) the amount of hardware you need and then building/renting a data center and/or hardware. It also provides some form of middleware for your applications, like AppFabric, so that they can communicate in the "cloud" a bit better. You also get load balancing on Azure, distributed hosting (e.g. Europe datacenters, USA datacenters...), fail safe mechanism already in place (automatic instance instantiation if one were to fail) and obviously, pay as you go & what you use benefits.
Here is the reference: Introduction to Azure Functions, Azure and WCF

Windows service Bus evaluation

My management is evaluating non-Azure Microsoft Windows Service Bus (Azure is out of consideration for security reasons). It will be used to setup topic/subscription model with a number of WCF services with netMessagingBinding that we building, so I just have a few basic questions about that.
Are there any specific hardware requirements like dedicated server, dedicated database etc. for WSB to run in production environment?
It's easy to configure WCF service to listen on a specific topic subscription. Is there any way for WCF service to listen to multiple subscriptions?
Appreciate the answers.
You can install the service components and the databases all on one server (that is the default). However, for a number of reasons, we installed the services on a dedicated app server and then created the Service bus databases on an existing database server. The install package allows you to specify a different db server. Check this article for the minimum server requirements
Yes you can get one WCF service to listen to multiple subscriptions. You would need to create two (or more) System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost instances and then run them inside one process. For example we had one windows service running two ServiceHost's. Each host listened at a different queue and therefore implemented a different contract. This meant where queues were logically grouped we didn't need a new windows service per queue. You could do the same with subscriptions.
For question one, you will have to go through the exercise of hardware sizing. the good news is that WCF services can scale vertically, so you can add up servers if there were issues in handling client load.
To do hardware sizing you will have to make an estimate the expected load and then do performance/scalablity testing to figure the load bearing capacity of your serviceBus/services .
you could find a lot of resources for load testing like this one http://seroter.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/testing-out-the-new-appfabric-service-bus-relay-load-balancing/
once you do load testing and come up with the numbers, you can then do sizing using references like this one http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx

Should 'test' environments consume 'test' external services?

We manage an application that consumes a number of external services as part of its general operation. Some services are Soap Services, others Restful Apis. Some services are also managed by us, others are third party services. Some services are central to the application's functionality, others are more auxiliary/non-mandatory.
Each external service exposes a 'test' and 'live' environment. We currently follow the policy that when our application is under test (that's development, testing and staging phases), it should consume the test version of the external service. It is only in our live environment that the live versions of the services are consumed.
There is a not-insignificant amount of overhead in managing which version of the service to consume between environments, but this is not the issue. My question is whether or not this policy is a good idea? Would we be better served instead by always consuming live versions of external services? Have we made the mistake of exposing the test versions of the external services we manage ourselves, i.e. should test environments remain private?
We have not (yet) been burned by not pointing to live external services until the application reaches 'live' but I accept that part of our problem is that we lack the granularity in our environments - by grouping development, testing and stage under the 'test' umbrella, we lose the ability to test against live external services.
All I realise at the moment is that there is little to be gained by consuming the test services in the test environments. There is negligible cost involved in consuming live third-party external services. Also, there is potential impact for our own services to be aware that they are being consumed by a client in the 'test' phase, but this could probably be accommodated.
I understand that the scenario is this somewhat open-ended, but there only seems to be 2 ways to go?
My concern would be accidentally modifying production data when running non-production instances of your application. As soon as you do one SetX(), POST/PUT, insert into/update, what have you, you are up the creek. That's a sneaky kind of bug that can be very hard to find.
If you're strictly consuming, then in theory it doesn't make a difference. In practice, I'd still be concerned. In your position, I'd probably be quite happy to have a non-live option. Otherwise I'd be thinking about stubbing out all those external services.

WCF cross-domain duplex: your Thawtes

(Ha! see what I did there?)
I have a system whereby a server pushes information from a central DB out to many client DBs (cross-domain via internet), and periodically they call services on the server. This has to withstand intermittent connections, ie queue messages.
I've created a development version using duplex MSMQ that I'm trying to apply transport security. From the reading I've done, it appears that:
MSMQ uses AD Windows Security, which is irrelevant cross-domain.
Due to the nature of duplex, each client is effectively a server as well. That means I need to pay $1200 every time I install the system with another client if I want to use SSL.
Are these facts correct? Am I really the only person who needs to secure services that are queued AND cross-domain AND duplex?
"MSMQ uses AD Windows Security, which is irrelevant cross-domain."
No, MSMQ uses Windows security which includes local accounts and, if available, domain accounts. MSMQ also uses certificates, if available.
"Due to the nature of duplex, each client is effectively a server as
well."
MSMQ doesn't use a client-server model. All MSMQ machines are effectively peers, sending messages between each other. For the $1,200 payment, are you referring to the certificate needed by the web service for sending MSMQ over HTTPS?
This is the first time I've seen anyone want to push secure messages over HTTPS to multiple destinations.
You may, in fact, be the only person in the world right now who wants to do this.
Let me embellish.
Not many companies are using MSMQ (in the grand scheme of things).
Of those that are, the vast majority are using only private queues, a small minority only use public queues.
Of those that are, only a handful are using it across the internet.
Of those that are, perhaps one is using it to exchange messages in both directions (that would be yours).
But that aside, it seems to me your main challenge will be using MSMQ as a secure transport layer over the internet. Although I have never had to do this, here are a couple of articles:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms701477(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164041.aspx
Sorry couldn't be of more help.

What would be the best approach to designing a highly available pool of web services?

I've heard a lot of people touting success using Linux based proxies to handle routing for high availability of web applications, but what are others doing with web services? I have a bank of WCF services that need to be moved to a high availability (failover) model, meaning that if a particular server hosting the WCF services goes down, the request is routed to another of the servers in the bank. I would rather stay away from implementing a Linux based solution, since there are no Linux knowledgeable people in the environment.
If you don't need durability, you can load balance WCF service requests just like normal web requests without doing anything special. If you need durability and want requests to survive being cut off mid-process, use the netMsmqBinding.
I would rather stay away from
implementing a Linux based solution,
since there are no Linux knowledgeable
people in the environment.
This is probably a strong enough reason to not use a Linux-based solution. Doing what you describe well requires reasonable expertise beyond a simple recipe approach, and substantial maintenance.