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.
Related
We have an existing wcf service, and I created a new project. I want to use it. I hit add service reference, pop in the URL, press OK, and it adds it as a service reference but there is no config generated.
I also tried svcutil.exe /language:cs /out:GeneratedProxy.cs /config:app.config [url] but no config is generated, only the proxy cs.
I'm using VS 2013 / .NET 4.0
My question is, is this a sign that the SVC itself has some missing data that is required to build the contracts, or is the problem with adding the service reference?
For the record I have tried unchecking the reuse types option which some questions on here have reported as fixing the problem.
Bonus question, do you think if I can't get this working that manually adding some generic default bindings and endpoint code to the web config will work?
First, the reason that why the Adding service reference generates nothing is that the WCF service is rest style service. By default, the proxy-based invocation of rest style WCF services is complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/wcf/feature-details/wcf-web-http-programming-model
Calling the WCF rest style service with the client proxy is uncommon. Generally, we construct an Http request by using an HTTP client library to call the service, such as HttpClient, WebClient.
How to fix "ERR_ABORTED 400 (Bad Request)" error with Jquery call to C# WCF service?
Besides, calling the WCF rest style service with the client proxy is feasible. Please refer to my previous link.
WCF: There was no endpoint listening at, that could accept the message
Feel free to let me know if there is anything I can help with.
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.
We currently have a WCF Service which is beginning to reach it's limits performance wise.
We have decided to add another server which will host another instance of the WCF Service.
We have web applications which must communicate with a specific server based on context... e.g. If the web application is dealing with objects from ServiceInstance1 then requests must be directed to ServiceInstance1's EndPoint. If the web application is dealing with objects from ServiceInstance2 then requests must be directed to ServiceInstance2's EndPoint.
I initially thought that a "Intermediate Service" or "Service Manager" could be created, the web application's Service Reference would be updated from the individual Service Instance to the "Intermediate Service" or "Service Manager" and said service would act as a "Broker" to the various Service Instances.
How is this accomplished?
I have currently added a ServiceReference to each service from the Manager however it seems that once a Service is "Referenced" it's types becomes specific to the that of the ServiceReference e.g.
ServiceInstance1's type's are all {ServiceInstance1}.
ServiceInstance2's type's are all {ServiceInstance2}.
I need the types to be the same on the web application end, so this obviously seems like the wrong way to do it.
I would also like that when methods are called on the client generated from referencing the "Intermediate Service" or "Service Manager" that the correct Service Instance is invoked, e.g.
IServiceManager.GetProjectById( {GUID} ) ->
Comes Back to ServiceManager ->
Determines which host has the project and returns the ProjectObject from the correct ServiceInstance.
Where ProjectObject is a Type Defined in ServiceInstance1 and ServiceInstance2.
I think the original service needs to have some of the DLL's pulled out so they can be referenced from the web application side and ServiceManager and a GenericWCF Client can be made.
If I am right hooray for me If someone can point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. If I am wrong can someone please scold me and show me how this is properly done!
The way to solve your problem is to create shared assembly with types used by both services. Reference this assembly on the client consuming your services (manager) and when creating proxies by Add service reference mark Reuse types from referenced assemblies.
What you are building is very simple message router. In WCF 4.0 there is additional support for routing services so you should check those features before developing your own. For WCF 3.5 MSDN magazine contains articles about building message router - part 1, part 2.
Just to Answer this and close it I wound up utilizing the Routing Strategy in .Net 4.0 and custom client class which I modeled after the generated classes from the Proxy.
Before I had the custom client ready I used the auto generated client code and I derived a class from it which allow me to change which service it was connecting to. I determined which service via a property which was made available on all service objects which were serialized.
Long story short this is working 100% as expected including the ServiceManager which can even be bypassed on certain calls which we allow.
We even have the ability to move a project from server to server during run time!
Thanks to everyone who helped! (Especially myself for actually doing the work without being spoon fed)
The easiest way to accomplish what you're trying to do is to stop generating your proxies using the server-hosted URL of the service. Instead, generate your proxies from the *.xsd and *.wsdl locally, and merely change the URL of the endpoint. Alternatively, you can use ChannelFactory<T> to generate proxies on-the-fly, and reference your interface .dll on the client side.
Once you've done that, you can use any common webserver load balancing technique to balance the load between the servers.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Visual Studio's "Service Reference" is not useful, and should not be used, for services you develop. It's useful only for services developed externally, whose URL and contracts are likely to NEVER change. I personally have never had occasion to use it. For your own services, you should probably be using ChannelFactory<T> or a class based on ClientBase<T> to work out the proxies.
Do you know if there is any way to access the wsdl file when you create a WCF service library? It seems you can get it when you create a WCF application but not the service library...
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks
The only way to access the WSDL is once you host and run the service. Otherwise, you cannot access it. So, create a host (or application as you are calling it) with a mex binding, then run the service and you should be able to access the WSDL.
Once you do this, you can save the WSDL as a file or something for later reference.
You cannot access the WSDL automatically. Of course if you compile the static WSDL into the service library, as a resource, you could then access it directly.
but what is it that you are trying to accomplish?
The "Service Description" is available inside a service. It is not the WSDL itself, but rather, the in-memory model of a service description. It includes the namespaces, the element names and types - everything in a WSDL, and more.
You can get at it with System.Web.Services.Description.ServiceDescription. Typically this is done within a ServiceHost, a ServiceHostFactory, or an IEndpointBehavior.
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.