I am working on a Silverlight application that uses WCF. I need to have my WCF project separate from the ASP.Net application that will host my Silverlight project. I am looking for some guidance on how I should organize my solution and list gotchas other people have experienced during debugging and deployment.
Specifically my questions are
What type of project should I use for the WCF service?(A WCF project, an ASP.NET project with self-hosted WCF services, something else)
What do I need to so to get it so that when I press F5 I can debug both my Silverlight project and my WCF service? Will I need a cross-domain policy just to debug the thing?
Some background info on why I want to do this:
I have legacy web application that I am gradually converting over to a Silverlight application. Because it is a large web application some of its features will be converted to Silverlight before others.
The legacy web application has lots of code in it that is no longer used. Much of the code that is no longer used references 3rd part assemblies. This is why I want to get rid of the old web application. So obviously I don't want to host WCF services that will be kept for future versions in it. That is my reason for wanting to make the WCF project separate.
We're doing the exact same thing.
We're using a WCF project just in case we have to change how it's hosted in the future. (I.E. no longer using IIS)
2.a. You can have a solution with your silverlight projects, and your wcf project. The silverlight project will have a service reference to the wcf service in your solution. That allows you to debug using F5. However, when you go to deploy, you will have to change your app.config service URIs to refer to your production location.
2.b. You will only need a cross-domain policy file if your fully qualified domain names are different for the wcf service and the silverlight app. Ours happen to be different. Here is an excellent article on when to use the policy file: Clicky
Good luck!
Just remember that when you get ready to deploy, if your service is going to be hosted on a different machine than your app, you need to deploy the service first. Then re-configure your service reference, and finally re-compile your Silverlight before deploying. Otherwise, your Silverlight app will look for the service on your local machine instead of where you deploy it.
Related
I understand what the differences are between a WCF Library and a WCF Service. I typically will build a WCF Library and reference it from a WCF Service. But if I am going to deploy to IIS, why not just deploy the WCF Library and forget about creating the WCF Service. Does it matter which one I deploy?
Answering my own question: From what I have read it doesn't seem to matter much if you deploy a wcf library or a wcf service. If you deploy the library, make sure that you copy the contents of your app config file to the web config file. The wcf service does also provide an svc file, but you only need that if you are using an earlier version of .net framework other than 4.0 or later. If you deploy the service instead of the library, the App config file for the service will pass the content onto the Web.config file when it is deployed. I am pretty sure that these are the only differences. The two people that replied to my question didn't really take the time to read and understand the question. It got marked as a possible duplicate, which clearly it is not.
Looking at an earlier 3.5 based solution, there is an WCF service within the same web project. I thought WCF services generally got their own project.
I usually separate my WCF projects out for maintenance purposes, but they can be within a web project. It is basically the same thing as the old ASMX [WebMethod] process. In fact, any method in a code-behind of a web form can be turned into a web service method by decorating the method accordingly.
I'm a bit new to WCF, so please bear with me. I have a very simple REST Service written up using .NET 3.5, which is exposed through a asp.net web application through a SVC file. Everything is working as expected.
What I would like to know is if it is possible for me to create a plugin structure in WCF, so that I can have third party developers write up expose their functionality through my service. I'm hoping it's possible to dynamically create my endpoints through code, at the moment everything is in my web.config and service.svc files (as far as exposing the contract).
In the end, what I would like to have an active running service that auto checks for new assemblies (if added to the plugins directory), and would automatically add new endpoints, which could have completely different functionalities. One could be a file transfer plugin, another could be a calculator, etc.
But first I need to know if it's even feasible... currently I'm looking into MEF to see if that might help out, as I'm used to just loading DLLs manually (in Desktop apps).
It is possible to use MEF through WCF, I have worked on a similar project in the past. You could expose functions from the plugin DLL's through MEF assume the implementer of the MEF interface is implimenting a function that starts a new WCF service with it's own end points, then call that function from the main service.
See some sample projects below, although none of them are doing what you are asking it is possible that the MEF plugins could have a service host that's starting their very own service with their own end points.
Creating WCF Service Extensibility through MEF
A sample demonstrating how WCF and MEF play together
I am developing a WCF web service and I used the WCF Service Application template to do that.
Does creating a "WCF Service Application" fulfill this requirement?
What are the advantage of creating a WCF Service Library over a WCF Service Application?
A service application includes a website host already setup for you. A service library is a library of services that a host can reference and startup.
If you start with a service library (recommended) you can then choose any host you wish (a windows service, IIS/ASP.NET, or even a console application) and you'd just reference your library from your new host. Choosing a Service Application limits your host to just IIS/ASP.NET (though this might be ok for your purposes, but will limit the protocols you can use).
Edit: Changes in IIS since I wrote this allow for a wider variety of protocols on ASP.NET activated services, so choosing a service application is much less limiting than before.
If all you have is the one project I see only added complexity if you separate for the heck of it. I used a library when I had some particular use cases where I had to host in both a windows service and in IIS.
For IIS you you can move the classes and interfaces to a library but keep your .SVC files in the web project. You must edit the .SVC files to point to the properly qualified classes.
I created a RoleService in my silverlight project and through that got hold of the embership/Role functionality. I am running this on a local machine and is wondering how to publish this to my website. I have 3 web applications:
My main web application where the silverlight object shoule be merged into
The silverlight project which lets me develop the silverlight application
The silverlight host application which I use for testing
In the web application (1) i have made the RoleService so that i can get a hold on my Roles. In the Silverlight application (2) I have a service reference to the service mentioned above which I consume and loads my Role data. This howecer doesnt work when i publich it online. But how do i get it to work online?
Is it because it is trying to connect to service with wrong address? If so, then you just need to propagate WCF service address to your Silverlight application through hosting web.config and start connecting to a correct service.
Let me know if this is the case, then I will share exact solution for this.