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.
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.
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?
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 Client website, a WCF service and a library of domain objects (.cproj).
I want the client to use my library of domain objects directly, not the proxy generated version of the domain objects. Is there a simple way of doing this?
Include a reference to the dll in your client project. Then add a Service Reference. When you add the service reference there is an option to use the types in the dll and not create them in the references.cs.
Include the library project or DLL in your client project rather than creating a service reference. You can generate the service reference to create all the necessary WCF configurations to call the service, but just don't use the generated proxy or datatypes (e.g. the code in Reference.cs) - use the types in the included DLL directly. You may need to write a client yourself, but this is simple, and can be basically copied from the generated client in a service reference.
That said, sharing the datatypes directly between the client and service sort of breaks service-oriented architecture patterns. Now both your client and service are dependent on the same DLL, rather than the client just being dependent on a service.
Has anyone done this? I've tried generating a c# proxy class and connecting through it, but I cannot figure out how to get IronPython to use the generated app.config file that defines the endpoint. It tries to connect, but I just get an error about no default endpoint. I would ideally like to make the connection using only IronPython code and not use the proxy class, if possible. The binding for the service I am trying to connect to is a NetTcpBinding if that makes any difference.
See my blog post. There are IronPython WCF service and client examples.
To use app.config, you probably must copy it to ipy.exe and rename it to ipy.exe.config but I have not tried it so I don't know whether it works or not.
Is your WCF service interface available in a shared assembly? If so, you could look at using the ChannelFactory to create your client proxy dynamically (instead of using the generated C# proxy). With that method you can supply all the details of the endpoint when you create the ChannelFactory and you won't require any configuration in your .config file.