i'm about to begin a WP7 project. i currently have a WCF REST service deployed on my LIVE servers, and my Android and iPhone clients are happily consuming this. how do i get my WP7 to communicate with my REST service? The server side is working fine and well, and there is no issue there.
what i thought i would be able to do was simply add my client library (compiled in SL) with all the interfaces, datacontracts etc, create a ChannelFactory, ensure the web behavior was on in the client and yay! away we go. this doesn't seem to be the case however. certainly i can't use the interface created because of the WebGetAttribute reference :S
what is the reccomended way? i would prefer to consume my service in the same way as the other services do for consistency, so i don't want to make new (and more verbose communication) bindings and simply expose the same service over a different endpoint. similarly using WebClient / WebHttpRequest just seems a bit backward: certainly we don't have to parse the response for the other types of bindings available, why would we for this?
any suggestions? basically i want to write as little code as possible to connect the client and the server (ideally as much as normal WCF communication would take) and would prefer to communicate with a channel, since there'd be no parsing or deserializing the JSON response on my behalf.
surely this is possible? most people working on mobile applications have chosen a REST service to communicate with, seems a bit odd that microsoft's mobile solution wouldn't neatly integrate with its own server side solution! i really hope i'm just stupid and have missed something quite glaring.
I believe at this point RESTSharp is your best option.
Another REST Client library: Spring.Rest
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I have one WPF client-server application. Now I have scenario like client will connect to server and server will push data to client periodically. I am bit confused about what technology and way should I choose for notification to clients.
SignalR is best for web application I think and I have desktop application. With WCF service, we can implement push notification through Duplex channel and callback. So can you please guide me what are the merits and demerits in using SignalR or WCF service ?
Thanks
Below are my observations from experiences:
SignalR pros:
Easy to startup, lower learning curve. You can easily run an example found from web
Exception handling (e.g. connection drops, timeouts) is embedded inside the API
SignalR cons:
Only supporting HTTP protocol
Duplex pros:
Supports TCP in addition to HTTP. This may be a serious performance gain if you know your client types and your system is working in a closed network. Also, working over TCP adds more connection stability than HTTP
Duplex cons:
Higher learning curve - harder to startup and have a stable solution. Want to verify it? Download a duplex and a SignalR sample from the web and see how much time you will spend to successfully run each other.
You need to handle all the exceptional cases (connection drops, timeouts, etc.)
I know I am not the only one who faced serious timeout problems when you want to use the duplex service for a long time. We need to make service calls periodically to keep client connections alive.
By the way, there are APIs exist for JavaScript, Desktop and Silverlight projects to consume SignalR services.
SignalR is not just about web. SignalR server side code does not care about the technology of its clients, you just need to have implementors at the client side.
If we isolate pusing data to the client, I would strongly recommend SignalR as it's much simpler than WCF in this aspect, I had my share of problems with WCF and I guess you had some yourself.
I found a simple console/web application sample here.
In general, Duplex WCF and using Callback like here seems very messy to me, there is a lot of configuration server side and this is why I think SignalR is simpler.
In addition, you can't use duplex (AFAIK) with javascript and objective-c.
I think you already got lots of data points about each of them. But selection of SignalR will provide you added advantage over development efforts which is in most of cases major decision block while selecting a technology.
You don't need to worry about API development / testing etc. and can have focus on your own implementation of the project.
Hope it helps!
SignalR can easily be used now with multiple clients from javascript, .NET both WinForms and WPF, and can even be used with a C++ client; Using a self hosted .NET signalr server (OWIN) is really nice way to have a standalone server that pushes / receives / broadcasts to multiple clients. The only thing that may be easier is ZeroMQ using its publish subscribe methodology.
One point that nobody has raised so far:
SignalR 1.0.1 requires .NET 4 on the server and client. Depending on
the version of your client and server that you are targeting that
might be an important factor to consider.
If you just want to update periodically for new data, you might be better to just use WCF and a polling mechanism from the client side rather than using either duplex WCF or signalr.
I am going to need a web service that receives a string via HTTP POST and processes it without any response to the client. However, since I'm not the one making the client (which will be cell phones) I am unable to use a generated client class to consume the service. The service would also need to be self hosted in a regular Windows service, if that matters.
As I'm not too experienced with web services nor WCF, I am frankly unsure if I can or should use WCF for this, but as it's the only type of web service I'm at least a little familiar with I figured it would be great to start out with one if at all possible.
I've been googling around quite a bit but haven't been able to find any good references to this, so I'd also be very grateful if someone has a link lying around to someplace that discusses it.
I think you need WCF Restful service with one way operation. Following link might help you:
A Developer's Guide to the WCF REST Starter Kit,
I have a web service that is used by many different clients using many different languages.
I want to switch it to wcf to take advantage of the many different endpoints.
However what has been stopping me is that I am afraid that the clients will have to use a special sdk to connect (if they are using java or php or some other language) that is different then the sdk they use to connect to the existing web service.
Is this true? Or is connecting to WCF the exact same as it is for web services in other languages.
The project I am currently working on has multiple WCF configurations, some are using the default SOAP implementation, and some are using a POX (plain-old-xml) style message.
So the short answer is 'yes' you can configure WCF in such a way to work with just about anything.
However, be warned that as soon as you step outside the default little box that WCF has set up for you, it gets pretty complicated. You end up with a lot of custom message parsing and security handling if you go to a POX message format. Its easier if you stick with SOAP though.
As for needing a 'special SDK' you won't. You can communicate with WCF with simple HTTP POST messages if needed.
I have clients that are using VB.NET apps (using SOAP) and Java apps (using POX) to hit my WCF services.
A basicHttpBinding endpoint in WCF is exactly a standard SOAP endpoint, and your Java or PHP clients will not have to change in any way.
I have two related questions about Web services:
(1) I'm currently writing a set of applications, and it occurred to me that maybe I'm not using the right tool for the job. Here is the spec:
There are many Windows servers behind different VPNs and firewalls.
Each of the servers has a Windows service running, that reports various information about it to a centralized server, via a Web service, both of which I've written, and have access to.
So I'm both the producer and the consumer, and I'm staying on the same platform (.NET). Maybe a web service isn't the way to go? I'm using one purely because it's easy to write and deploy, and I'm the most comfortable with them. Should I really be using WCF for this?
(2) In the web service, I'm creating a State object to represent the state of the server, and sending it as a parameter. However, adding a service reference creates a proxy of the State class. It seems gacky to copy the properties of the State object to the proxy, and then send the proxy. Should I just replace the proxy class with the real class in the auto-generated code (i.e., include a reference to the State class instead)?
By "web services" I assume you mean an ASMX? I would go with WCF is possible, simply because you lose nothing but gain lots of flexibility. You could, for example, switch from XML-over-HTTP to Binary-over-TCP through a simple config change.
I would suggest to use WCF and use the Net.Tcp binding. It should be efficient enough for 300 clients. For the proxy class issue use the /reference option for the svcutil tool when you generate the proxy. This will allow you to share classes between server and client. I would not use this option if interoperability was a concern but since you stated that you develop both the clietn and the service and all in .Net it is a valid use in your case.
Your distinction between "Web Services" and WCF is a false distinction.
ASMX Web Services is the original .NET SOAP Web Service technology, introduced in .NET 1.0. It has been replaced by WCF, which can everything that ASMX can do, plus a whole lot more (including support for the WS-* standards).
Microsoft now considers ASMX Web Services, and the XML Serializer they're based on, to be "legacy technology". See "Microsoft says: ASMX Web Services are a “Legacy Technology”".
With WCF, since you have control of both sides of the operation, and can share the .dll in which the service contract is defined, you can and perhaps should be using ChannelFactory<IYourServiceContractHere> instead of auto-generating those ugly proxy classes with service references.
Here's the first hit I found on this topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/juveriak/archive/2008/02/03/using-channels-vs-proxies-in-wcf.aspx
If it is platform independent, I would certainly recommend WCF.
I've done exactly what your describing to great effect across more than 300 locations. I don't think you made the wrong call.
Another thing you could consider that would work well is using MSMQ. In this case, however, you'll either need to write event triggers (COM) or an event queue processing service.
I'm writing a server app with a silverlight client. At some point I'd like non-silverlight clients to be able to use my services. Right now I've written some WCF services which get polled, but I'm not happy with the responsiveness. I'm thinking of switching the code over to using Silverlight/WCF duplex polling, but if I do that, will I be stuck with Silverlight as my only client? Is it better to write my own long-polling service using normal WCF http services?
I don't see your issue there. You can just define another binding for use by other clients (like WsHttpDualBinding). The same server code will perform the exact same task regardless of the underlying binding. That's the whole point of using WCF.
You can find a AJAX sample here for using a WCF duplex service http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2009/09/scale-out-of-silverlight-http-polling.html
By other .NET client - yes. By anything else : no. WsHttpDual is definitely NOT an interoperable protocol. It also has plenty of other drawbacks and pitfalls and I'd try to stay away from it as much as possible......
Marc