I have an application service layer (which all return serializable viewmodels). Some of these app services need to be callable via AJAX by client code in the Web UI. I'm currently wrapping them in ASMX files that do nothing but dictate the response format as JSON delegate each call to the application service class with the same signature.
Is it advisable to try to save a few lines of code by exposing the appropriate application service classes as WCF services? Can someone point me to an example? Any potential pitfalls for usage in WebForms client code?
Microsoft now considers ASMX services to be "legacy technology". You should not use them for any new development. They have been completely replaced by WCF. For instance, see the top of this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb885203.aspx:
This topic is specific to a legacy
technology. XML Web services and XML
Web service clients should now be
created using Windows Communication
Foundation .
Related
I have created a WCF service and hosted it through self hosting. This service doesn't have any metada published.
First Question
Can I consume it through Visual Studio, Add Service Reference? Hopefully not.
Can I consume it by creating manual proxy, i.e. ChannelFactory<ServiceContract>....?Hopefully yes.
Now in the second scenario, the client must be .Net, right?
So it implies that, to consume a wcf service on a non-.net platform, we have to expose its metadata?
Can't a WCF service without metadata, consume by Ajax client, or say Java client??
There are 3 options to consume a WCF Service:
If the service exposes a WSDL use "add service reference" from VS (or an equivalent from another platform). Note that if you do not want to expose the WSDL you could expose it just temporarly, save the WSDL in a file, and then send it to user in any platform to generate proxy from it. You can turn off the WSDL immediately after you save it. Also note that even if the WSDL is not exposed still you need to protect the web service from unauthorized access.
If this is a .Net client it can compile with the same Service Contract assembly and use ChannelFactory etc.
Any platform can send raw soap message (e.g. XML) to the service. Of course they need to know what is the right format. A WSDL can help but even without it if they have a working sample they can imitate it.
WCF provides REST (Representational State Transfer) support to consume it by non .NET client like JavaScript (AJAX), java, Objective C, web browser, etc...
Basically WCF REST is exposes methods and transferring data over the HTTP protocol and it supports all HTTP operations (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE). This feature is making it platform independent as well as it doesn’t require metadata exposed.
Please refere below links to get more about WCF REST:
An Introduction To RESTful Services With WCF
WCF REST Programming Model Overview
WCF Rest vs. WCF SOAP
Create RESTful WCF Service API: Step By Step Guide
I have built a web service (WCF) as part of our company product, to support mobile devicies. The service is exposed via SOAP and is consumed by Android and Windows Phone 7 clients. Now we are spreading and need to add support for iPhone clients and those lazy iPhone developers are complaing, that they won't use SOAP, because its terrible, microsoftish, bloatware and there is no sufficient framework for that, etc etc and JSON ftw!
As it is WCF it was easy to create json api for this web service (new interface and little changes in web.config, love WCF!), the only problem is that I am using the built-in WCF Authentication service for authorization and this service is of course exposed via SOAP and I didn´t find a way to make it REST with json. So is there a way to somehow make it RESTful and consume/respond json?
My actual plan is to make another auth service, that will internally just call the existing WCF one via SOAP, but I don't like this workaround. I assume that, if there is not a way to make the WCF one RESTfull, later or sooner, I end up writing the auth service, which in my opinon will not be that hard.
I am starting a new webservice project which will be consumed by multiple consumer applications done in different technology like ASP, ASP.Net and PHP. I am planning to develop this service as a WCF service. I am new to WCF and I understand WCF is like umbrella tech which has all the features for developing a distributed SOA applications.
I would like to get your advice on whether my choice of opting WCF service over classic asmx service is correct. The consumer applications are existing application done different technologies as I said before. This service is a simple service that creates and updates user information in a centralized DB.
If my decision of choosing WCF is correct, then please let me know if there are any specific things I need to consider so that the existing application can consume my WCF service without any hiccups. In other words, I can provide a asmx service for this which they can consume directly without any issues (and currently they are consuming some of our asmx service. Since the current requirement is new I want it to be done with WCF). Likewise, the consumer should be able to consume my service like they consume asmx service.
I am asking this question because WCF provides additional features like security, etc. and hence the consumers should also follow the practice to communicate with the service.
Any advice is highly appreciated.
You probably want to use BasicHttpBinding in your WCF service and, although I'm not a PHP developer, I understand that PHP 5 has a SOAP library that can be used to create a service proxy based on the WSDL document exposed by the WCF service, assuming metadata exchange is enabled.
I am new to WCF and Web Services in general. What are the improvements that WCF brings to the table? Can anyone give a side-by-side example of a traditional web service and the same one written using WCF and point out the differences and advantages?
Duplicate question Moving ASP.net webservices to WCF
EDIT: Think i found the answer you where looking for a side-by-side code based comparison and even better it's from MSDN: Comparing ASP.NET Web Services to WCF Based on Development
There are several related questions:
Difference between aspnet web method and wcf webservice
Benfits of using WCF
Moving aspnet web services to wcf
However you asked for a side by side comparison in which case i think Sam's Wcf vs ASMX blog article is more what you are looking for.
Quoting ad-verbatim (let me know if i should just leave it as a link):
WCF vs. ASMX
Protocols Support
WCF
HTTP
TCP
Named pipes
MSMQ
Custom
UDP
ASMX
HTTP only
Hosting
ASMX
Can be hosted only with HttpRuntime on IIS.
WCF
A WCF component can be hosted in any kind of environment in .NET 3.0, such as a console application, Windows application, or IIS.
WCF services are known as 'services' as opposed to web services because you can host services without a web server.
Self-hosting the services gives you the flexibility to use transports other than HTTP.
WCF Backwards Compatibility
The purpose of WCF is to provide a unified programming model for distributed applications.
Backwards compatibility
WCF takes all the capabilities of the existing technology stacks while not relying upon any of them.
Applications built with these earlier technologies will continue to work unchanged on systems with WCF installed.
Existing applications are able to upgrade with WCF
New WCF transacted application will work with existing transaction application built on System.Transactions
WCF & ASMX Integration
WCF can use WS-* or HTTP bindings to communicate with ASMX pages
Limitations of ASMX:
An ASMX page doesn’t tell you how to deliver it over the transports and to use a specific type of security. This is something that WCF enhances quite significantly.
ASMX has a tight coupling with the HTTP runtime and the dependence on IIS to host it. WCF can be hosted by any Windows process that is able to host the .NET Framework 3.0.
ASMX service is instantiated on a per-call basis, while WCF gives you flexibility by providing various instancing options such as Singleton, private session, per call.
ASMX provides the way for interoperability but it does not provide or guarantee end-to-end security or reliable communication.
WCF is far wider in scope than ASP.Net webservices.
WCF can run in any application. APS.Net webservices only run in IIS.
WCF supports models like ReST, Remoting, SOAP, MSMQ etc. ASP.Net only supports SOAP
WCF is more configurable.
WCF supports a more declarative way of programming. You can get more done with less code.
ASP.NET Web Services are pretty much just that. Web Services. They're SOAP/WSDL based and provide their services only to the web.
WCF Services offer a much more flexible framework. For instance, depending on how the service is defined, it can be a Web Service hosted in IIS which serialized its data via XML and uses the REST model...or it can be a Remote Windows Service that is hosted in it's own process and serializes its data via binary. All of this is achieved using the different Service/Data contracts in WCF.
In short...you can make a WCF service look almost identical to a .NET 2.0 Web Service fairly easily but, with a little work, you can do a WHOLE LOT MORE.
What is the difference between them?
When would I opt for one over the other?
This answer is based on an article that no longer exists:
Summary of article:
"Basically, WCF is a service layer that allows you to build applications that can communicate using a variety of communication mechanisms. With it, you can communicate using Peer to Peer, Named Pipes, Web Services and so on.
You can’t compare them because WCF is a framework for building interoperable applications. If you like, you can think of it as a SOA enabler. What does this mean?
Well, WCF conforms to something known as ABC, where A is the address of the service that you want to communicate with, B stands for the binding and C stands for the contract. This is important because it is possible to change the binding without necessarily changing the code. The contract is much more powerful because it forces the separation of the contract from the implementation. This means that the contract is defined in an interface, and there is a concrete implementation which is bound to by the consumer using the same idea of the contract. The datamodel is abstracted out."
... later ...
"should use WCF when we need to communicate with other communication technologies (e,.g. Peer to Peer, Named Pipes) rather than Web Service"
From What's the Difference between WCF and Web Services?
WCF is a replacement for all earlier web service technologies from Microsoft. It also does a lot more than what is traditionally considered as "web services".
WCF "web services" are part of a much broader spectrum of remote communication enabled through WCF. You will get a much higher degree of flexibility and portability doing things in WCF than through traditional ASMX because WCF is designed, from the ground up, to summarize all of the different distributed programming infrastructures offered by Microsoft. An endpoint in WCF can be communicated with just as easily over SOAP/XML as it can over TCP/binary and to change this medium is simply a configuration file mod. In theory, this reduces the amount of new code needed when porting or changing business needs, targets, etc.
ASMX is older than WCF, and anything ASMX can do so can WCF (and more). Basically you can see WCF as trying to logically group together all the different ways of getting two apps to communicate in the world of Microsoft; ASMX was just one of these many ways and so is now grouped under the WCF umbrella of capabilities.
Web Services can be accessed only over HTTP & it works in stateless environment, where WCF is flexible because its services can be hosted in different types of applications. Common scenarios for hosting WCF services are IIS,WAS, Self-hosting, Managed Windows Service.
The major difference is that Web Services Use XmlSerializer. But WCF Uses DataContractSerializer which is better in performance as compared to XmlSerializer.
Web Service
is based on SOAP and return data in XML form.
It support only HTTP protocol.
It is not open source but can be consumed by any client that understands xml.
It can be hosted only on IIS.
WCF
is also based on SOAP and return data in XML form.
It is the evolution of the web service(ASMX) and support various protocols like TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, Named Pipes, MSMQ.
The main issue with WCF is, its tedious and extensive configuration.
It is not open source but can be consumed by any client that understands xml.
It can be hosted with in the applicaion or on IIS or using window service.
Basic and primary difference is, ASP.NET web service is designed to exchange SOAP messages over HTTP only while WCF Service can exchange message using any format (SOAP is default) over any transport protocol i.e. HTTP, TCP, MSMQ or NamedPipes etc.
What is the difference between web service and WCF?
Web service use only HTTP protocol while transferring data from one application to other application.
But WCF supports more protocols for transporting messages than ASP.NET Web services. WCF supports sending messages by using HTTP, as well as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), named pipes, and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ).
To develop a service in Web Service, we will write the following code
[WebService]
public class Service : System.Web.Services.WebService
{
[WebMethod]
public string Test(string strMsg)
{
return strMsg;
}
}
To develop a service in WCF, we will write the following code
[ServiceContract]
public interface ITest
{
[OperationContract]
string ShowMessage(string strMsg);
}
public class Service : ITest
{
public string ShowMessage(string strMsg)
{
return strMsg;
}
}
Web Service is not architecturally more robust. But WCF is architecturally
more robust and promotes best practices.
Web Services use XmlSerializer but WCF uses DataContractSerializer. Which is
better in performance as compared to XmlSerializer?
For internal (behind firewall) service-to-service calls we use the net:tcp
binding, which is much faster than SOAP.
WCF is 25%—50% faster than ASP.NET Web Services, and approximately 25%
faster than .NET Remoting.
When would I opt for one over the other?
WCF is used to communicate between other applications which has been developed on other platforms and using other Technology.
For example, if I have to transfer data from .net platform to other application which is running on other OS (like Unix or Linux) and they are using other transfer protocol (like WAS, or TCP) Then it is only possible to transfer data using WCF.
Here is no restriction of platform, transfer protocol of application while transferring the data between one application to other application.
Security is very high as compare to web service
The major difference is time-out, WCF Service has timed-out when there is no response, but web-service does not have this property.