Is it possible to have the proxy classes that are generated when setting a service reference implement INotifyPropertyChanged?
In this case it's a silverlight app referencing a WCF service?
Update:
The SlSvcUtil.exe commandline utility is part of the silverlight SDK installed {Program Files}\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Tools will generate the classes with an INotifyPropertyChanged implementation.
I'll leave this question up, as I live in hope that someone will say this is possible from Visual Studio without haing to launch an external tool.
Proxy classes do not implement that interface, only DataContracts do. If you open .svcmap file generated by adding service reference in XML viewer you can change EnableDataBinding element to true and update service reference from VS. I thought that true is default value and you have to manually changed it if you don't want to use INotifyPropertyChanged. What is so specific in your service?
Related
I have a WCF deployed on IIS. Now by adding web reference of it i am using it on my app.
So I have two questions:
Is it the best method of consuming WCF.
If the answer of first question is yes then what is the role of svcutil.exc, I mean what is the use of creating wcf proxy class. and if the answer is "No" then why?
It is the easiest solution if you develop with visual studio and have access the remote WCF service.
If you are developing using another IDE, you might want to use SvcUtil to generate your proxies.
If you prefer to have a simple CS file containing the generated client, you might also choose to generate it using SvcUtil.
You may also completely ignore SvcUtil and the Service Reference wizard and use the ChannelFactory class to generate proxies dynamically.
You should use "Add Service Reference" in Visual Studio (not Add Web Reference) for WCF.
It is the easiest way - since you can do it right in Visual Studio. What it does under the covers is basically call svcutil.exe (or you can do that manually, from the command line yourself), and create a service proxy class for use on the client side.
The use of svcutil.exe is many fold - you can create a client proxy class from a running service (or from an existing WSDL/XSD file), you can verify services, you can export metadata from a service for clients to consume, and a great many more options. It's the "Swiss Army Knife" of WCF tools.
WCF uses a concept that all calls to your service must go through a client proxy - this is the place where the entire WCF runtime lives, and where all the WCF extensibility points are located. This proxy converts your call to a method on the client into a serialized message that gets sent across the network to the server for processing, and it also handles "unpacking" the response from the call back into classes and objects on your client side for your use.
Adding a service reference is the quickest and easiest way but not always the best way. If you want performance then using ChannelFactory<T> is the way to go. You should know different ways to create a client side proxy and customisations that you can do.
An excellent resource is WcfGuidanceForWpf. Don't let the WPF in it scare you as it is really an excellent guidance for general WCF as well.
I have a win32 application that uses client side plugins and uses a Win32 Service via TCP/IP. I would like to also dynamically load assemblies on the WCF service based on the addition of new plugins. Currently I have to add the the ServiceContract and OperationContract to the Services class and IService interface and then re-compile. Is there a way to dynamically load the WCF assemblies and not have to generate the class and interface references? Can these be moved out of the WCF Win32 service into external classes?
I was wondering about this as well, but came to the conclusion that this was not a question of whether or not its possible, but should you do it? Even if you could generate the contract definitions dynamically, you still need to notify the client of the change, they in turn would need to regenerate the proxy in order to interact with the new service definition, and then provide an implementation dynamically. A better approach is to redesign your service so it implements a particular strategy (read Strategy pattern). The contract remains static, but the implementation changes based on client input. That way your service can dynamically load modules without your client being aware of it.
HTH.
Steve
I have a windows workflow foundation 4 service and a simple client.
When I add the service reference in the client visual studio doesn't generate a proxy class,
only the interface and types.
Anybody have any solution?
What should I do to work with the wf4 service properly? What kind of namespace and classes and contracts I need to use?
Thanks!
When the client project is a workflow project type setting a service reference works a bit different. Instead of generating the standard proxy classes it generates Send & ReceiveReply activities for use on a workflow. Very nice if you are building a workflow, not so when you want to call the service using regular code.
You can either use SvcUtil manually to generate your proxy classes or use the ChannelFactory with the generated interface to create the required proxy object. The last is usually the easier option.
Is it possible to add a service reference in visual studio, which generates the local proxy class to call the WCF service when using the netTcpBinding?
As I understood it, the service reference method requires a WSDL to be exposed by the service, which is only supported by the http bindings no?
Perhaps, could I add the service reference locally in development, but then switch the configuration to use nettcp at runtime in production?
The reason I am asking is because I am hosting in a windows service (server 2003, so no WAS, and can't use IIS). And we are unable to change the permissions to do the HTTP namespace reservation ... so we can't use the HTTP bindings. NetTcp works, but in this specific case the object graph we're passing back and forth involves objects generated in the service by an EDMX model ... so we can't share it in a contract assembly.
Thanks in advance!
Simply add a binding using mexTcpBinding.
Is it possible to add a service reference in visual studio,
which generates the local proxy class to call the
WCF service when using the netTcpBinding?
Yes, most definitely!
As I understood it, the service reference method requires a WSDL
to be exposed by the service, which is only supported by the http bindings no?
No, definitely not - WCF metadata (either its own specific format, or exposed as WSDL / XSD files) is definitely available for all SOAP-based calls - regardless of their transport.
Can you show us what you have, in terms of server-side config? Most likely, you're just missing a little config setting or something - if we see what you have, we might be able to pinpoint that and help you more!
All bindings are exposed though WSDL. If you add the NETTCP bindings svcutil will atuo generate the client correctly. I haven't used it in the ADD reference in VS as i have always preferred to generate the class with svcutil.
I have a Silverlight application communicating with the server side through WCF services. Initially I had everything in the main Silverlight application, but now I wanted to factor our some classes to a separate Silverlight Class Library project. This however gave me some odd issues...
I wanted to factor the classes that does the WCF communication out to a separate project. So I:
Created a new project; Silverlight class library
Moved the classes from my Silverlight application to my Silverlight class library
Removed the Service reference in the application as I no longer call it from the app.
Added a Service reference from the class library project.
Now - compiling is fine and I get intellisense for the service stuff in the Class Library, so it seems to be fine. I also updated the service and got the updates in the Class Library.
But when running the application it fails when doing a service call giving the following error:
InvalidOperationException was unhandled by user code
Could not find default endpoint element that references contract 'MyServiceReference.IMyService' in the ServiceModel client configuration section. This might be because no configuration file was found for your application, or because no endpoint element matching this contract could be found in the client element.
Seems like it can't find the service, but why? I assume there should be no problem to have service references from a Silverlight Class Library as it allows me to add one?
IT can't find any service configuration - where do you have the config for the WCF service? By default, the client app (the EXE) will have a app.config that contains the service endpoints to connect to.
Also by default, class libraries (DLL's) don't have their own configuration but rely on their hosting app to provide the configuration for them.
So all in all - you're probably missing the config for the client endpoint. Most likely, it has been created as an app.config in the class library project, but that's not being used, really - you'll have to move the <system.serviceModel> section up to the main app's config (I'm not fluent in Silverlight, but you'll know where to put it).
Marc