I have previously built WPF apps that host their own WCF service running on a custom port. Which is a great simple way for other apps to send messages between each other.
I have recently inherited a Silverlight 4 app from a client and they would like a way to send messages to it. I figured that WCF would be a simple way, but it is not possible to host a service in Silverlight.
What is a good, simple, way to send messages/communicate with a Silvelight app?
I have seen a little about the LocalMessageSender but I have no experience with it, can a WPF app, running on a different machine send a message to a Silverlight application using the LocalMessageSender class?
(Polling from the Silverlight app is not a prefered option)
I dont mind having to run the app in out of browser mode to get around some issues if need be.
EDIT Updated question
You can add Silverlight enabled WCF services and communicate with them like you did in the WPF app.
just so you know, SL only supports basicHttpBinding and (new in SL4) netTcpBinding. The later is intended for Intranet scenarios. As tchrikch said, you should be able to reference your service just by adding a simple reference in Visual Studio. As for the communication part, this may prove to be a little difficult. I would suggest looking at HTML5 WebSockets and see if you can push messages to the client from the server that way. I've only recently started looking at this as a solution for one of our projects but haven't had time to look any deeper.
HTH
Steve
Related
I realize that we cannot directly access SQL Server database from a UWP app, and have to use a WCF service as a mediator for this. (Which is totally stupid, since even competitors like MySQL provides API for Microsoft's runtime, while Microsoft's own RDBMS does not!)
I don't have any experience with WCF, but after going through some tutorials, I believe I can make a WCF service to communicate with my SQL Server (although I do not like making my simple application use a 3-tier architecture, which shouldn't be imposed on me). Anyways, I do not want to host this WCF service on my website, since I'm making this only for this UWP app. Is there a way I can bundle/pack this WCF service along with UWP app itself, such that service runs on client machine only when thhe start my app, and stops later when app is closed/suspended/minized.
The UWP app I'm developing, also have a WPF version and a web version (in ASP.NET), all of which were connected to MySQL database till now, and it worked flawless. Recently I decided to shift to SQL Server since I'm using Microsoft technologies for all my softwares and thought SQL Server will have better integration and support. But now I find it rather opposite, and thinking to switch back to MySQL database.
You can not bundle a WCF service (or REST api) with your Universal Windows app. UWP apps run in a sandbox environment on a different .NET runtime than your WCF service. You could run the WCF service in IIS, or even better create a self-hosted ASP.NET WebAPI project (so no need for IIS) to access your database. But this service will have to be installed separately from the app.
Note that because UWP apps run in a sandbox, some in-app databases like SQLite are inside this sandbox and can not be accessed by your other apps (WPF, website) by default (there are some hacks to bypass this).
So I think your best bet is to stick with MySQL and use the MySQL connector.
We are building a Silverlight-based system in the financial domain. We need to push notifications/stream data from the server to the Silverlight client. We use Silverlight 4 for the client and Windows Server 2003/IIS6 on the server side (this excludes AppFabric).
So far I haven't been able to find a Silverlight-compatible data push solution that would be secure and scalable. Out of the box sockets don't seem to support SSL and the PollingDuplexHttpBinding doesn't seem to scale for the web farm implementations/failover. It also looks like that IIS is not the best platform for long polling applications.
Has anybody successfully implemented an enterprise-grade notification push solution for Silverlight and what technologies/products have you used?
Comet servers are pretty scaleable a lot of financial systems use them.
An example of this marketsplus.com.au/evolve who use a Comet server to pump price info up to their Silverlight client.
Some Comet implementations are meteorserver.org, pokein.com or frozenmountain.com/websync.
We would like to develop WCF service for SL clients, which should support session management (PerSession) and callbacks. The WCF service would be hosted as a Windows service.
What would be best WCF binding choice (wsdual, pollingDuplex, any other)? Please also provide for/against points.
Regards,
There are no others. Silverlight does not support WSDualHttpBinding. You can choose PollingDuplexHttpBinding or PollingDuplexHttpBinding.
Have been working a little more in this area and it appears this is an area of constant and recent change. As of Silverlight 4, NetTcpTransport and HttpTransport are both supported using either text or binary encoding. It appears SL5 delivers further enhancements.
There is an interesting benchmark app here which allows you to profile relative performance of the two protocols. Though it was built for SL4, you can download, update the target framework to SL5 and see how it goes. It is a great way to make sure you've got everything setup properly.
Using NetTcpTransport should mean you can also use PerSession instancing on the server.
I have the following scenario:
We develop a silverlight 4 app for our customers, that will be used as an out-of-browser app. The app is working offline, i.e. app and database are on the users local machine. The app is using WCF-RIA-services to connect to the local database. The database will be an SQL Server Express, SQL Server CE or MySQL. We are using MVVMLight and MEF.
An external webserver is only used for updating the app from time to time or adding new modules to the app. To achieve this we do something similar as shown in Jeremy Likness blog (http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jlikness/archive/2010/05/25/silverlight-out-of-browser-dynamic-modules-in-offline-mode.aspx )
The reasons why we are doing such a scenario are complex. But to keep a long story short it is mainly for compatibility reasons for a later online version and we don't want to use WPF. So we need to get this working with Silverlight and WCF-RIA services.
Ok, that's the scenario and here's the question:
Do we need a local webserver in this scenario? The app is programmatically installed as out-of-browser, the database is local and connected via WCF-RIA.
If yes, which webserver would be sufficient? It should be installed and configured via an initial setup that is executed by the customer. The customer should not have to do anything with configuring the webserver.
Any other ideas or comments on this scenario? Any other possible solutions for this?
Thanks for your help
Dirk
silverlight wasn't meant to be used this way I think. So it would be like when you are developing app in visual studio and use Cassini to see result - everything runs locally - but you still need a web server. Maybe more info here - http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/WPF-vs-Silverlight
I´m not able to provide with a full answer to your problem, as we are currently facing the same problem. (WPF not being cross-platform, Very specific hardware on some clients)
But I may share some of our thoughts on our type of Thick-Silverlight-Client:
To keep deployment etc. simple we use a self-hosting process (installed as background process)
We may not use RIA as the background process has to run using Mono VM (but for MS-only solution see Can WCF RIA Services be self hosted? )
Architectural thoughts on standalone "Clients":
Depending on your requirements implementing a server for each client communicating with the "main"-server by messages (NServiceBus) may be overkill. But if you want to use a client database if offline and silverlight for ui you should consider using an event-driven-architecture.
There is a slideshow on combining "Event-Driven-Architecture" & "CQRS" with Silverlight. But i would not use it as a blueprint more like an inspiration.
http://www.slideshare.net/dennisdoomen/cqrs-and-event-sourcing-an-alternative-architecture-for-ddd
I want to interact with a running process (doing things like querying information and changing settings) through a web application. How would I accomplish this?
From a 1000 foot view, you can expose an entry point from the running application the web service can access. In the case of ASP.NET/Windows Services (or any other running .net application on a windows machine) you can create a remotable object in the Windows Service which the ASP.NET web service can call and interface with.
If I were to do this on my own I would expose an API for the application using sockets. If you wanted to geat into the real crazy stuff you could expose a SOAP interface with your application - then have a MUCH eaiser time intergrating the control of the application in C# or even PHP.
I could be more specific but need to know
what OS you are running on
what
server side language you are using
for your webpage
do you have the
ability to modify the application you
want to control?