9. January 2012
ZeroKoll
Azure , WCF
As you might have noticed from previous posts, I am somewhat interested in the Azure Service Bus. Why? Well, why not? To be honest, I don’t actually know exactly why, but I feel that it offers something very flexible out of the box, and without to much hassle.
One of the later feature that was added to it is the support for load balancing when using message relaying. (You can read more about message relaying here)
It is pretty cool, and just works… And by just works, I mean it really just works. If you have a service using message relaying today, adding another instance will automatically enable the feature. But remember, the messages are delivered to ONE of the services, not both. So if your service cannot handle that, make sure you change the implementation to make sure that only one instance is running at any time.
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There are many ways to expose functionality and data from a server to a client. And there is probably almost as many going the other way… In Microsoft scenarios, using WCF is the obvious choice for most of us, and when people talk WCF, they generally talk SOAP based webservices.
SOAP can however be a less than ideal choice in a some cases. It is way more complicated than some of the other options, and on top of that it has a tendency to bloat the messages being sent, which can be an issue when working with mobile clients for example.
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5. December 2011
ZeroKoll
WCF
Lately I have been working with a bit of WCF for a client, and one of the things I have had to do is to create a service behavior to handle some security things. However, due to the fact that this application needed to run in several different environments, it needed to have different configuration under different circumstances.
The real need was actually to be able to remove the behavior in some circumstances, and add it in some. But I didn’t really want to do it through a bunch of if-statements in my behavior. Instead I wanted it to be done through configuration so that I could turn it on and off using config transforms…
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Lately I have been working on an Azure project for a client (if you haven’t noticed from my Azure-centric blog posts as of late). A part of this, we have built a WCF service that exposes the functionality that we need. However, we are not actually building a client, only the service. So we don’t have a great way of testing the service. This is obviously where the “WCF Test Client” comes in.
For those of you who don’t know what this is, it is a small client that hooks up to any available service and creates a proxy for you. You can then use this proxy through the interface and call your service.
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I am now about a week and a half into my latest Azure project, which so far has been a lot of fun and educational. But the funky thing is that I am still excited about working with the Service Bus, even though we are a week and a half into the project. I guess there is still another half week before my normal 2 week attentions span is up, but still!
So what is so cool about the bus, well, my last 2 posts covered some of it, but it is just so many cool possibilities that open up with it.
This post has very little to do with what I am currently working on, and to be honest, the sample is contrived and stupid, but it shows how we can use REST based services with the bus.
29. September 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure , WCF
My last post was a bit light on the coding side I know. I also know that I promised to make up for that with a post with some actual code. And this is it! Actually, this is one of them. My plan is to walk through several of the features over the next few posts in the n00b kind of way.
That is, I am going to go through the basics for each of the features I deem interesting, making it easy to follow for people who are new to the Service Bus. And please don’t be offended by the “n00b” comment. We are all “n00bs” at some point in every thing we do.
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28. September 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure , WCF
For the last year, there have been few things in the development space I have heard as much about, as I have heard about Windows Azure. Microsoft has been pushing the Azure platform hard, we all know that, but not all of us have had the chance to try it out though.
Luckily I have had the fortune of being on a few projects that have been using it, but to be honest, I haven’t been really blown away yet. Yes…it does offer some awesome features that work extremely well in certain scenarios, but I would still claim that it isn’t for everyone. Having that said, I admit that I have only scratched the surface of the platform…
Lately however, more or less every time I hear Azure, it comes bundled with the term Service Bus. Either in “this would be such a great scenario for the service bus”, or in “wonder if we can get the service bus in there so that we can try it out”. Ok…so one of these are ok, the other isn’t to be honest… Playing with the service bus isn’t hard, as I will show you in future posts, and thus does not need to be added to a project to be tried. But before I start coding, I want to have a little rant about what it is. Or at least a rant about how I have understood it…
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Ok, so in my last post, I gave a brief introduction to WCF for the complete n00b. As a follow up to this, I would like to have a look at some different ways to consume these services.
The “normal” way to do it is obviously by adding a service reference to the project in VS, but there are alternatives that can make sense.
The samples I am going to use are specifically for Silverlight as they focus on simple bindings and features that Silverlight supports, but it can still be used for any .NET client.
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Ok…So I am more of a general .NET and Silverlight developer, but it is hard to get around the fact that WCF infiltrates most of the projects I ever work on. And after having read a substantial part of Juval Löwy’s book about WCF, I have realized that there was a lot that I didn’t know and didn’t fully understand. Not that I am saying that I get it all now, but I have a better understanding at least.
The thing is that WCF isn’t really very hard in most cases, but having a basic understanding makes it a lot easier. And to be honest, the basics will take you a long way when working with Silverlight, since Silverlight doesn’t support a lot of the more advanced features. To be honest, the WCF support in Silverlight is fairly basic, but it is enough…
So based on this, I thought I would try and write a down to earth and simple introduction to the main concepts in WCF.
Ok, so this post is definitely going down in the books as “why would you do that” for a lot of people, but it actually has its benefits in some cases. What I want to show, is how we can work with WCF services and service interfaces without having to add a service reference to Visual Studio and instead auto generate the required code using T4 templates…
So why would I want to do that? Well, in some cases it is kind of tedious and even complicated to spin up the service just to be able to update the service reference and in some cases it isn’t even possible to get access to the WSDL that is required to create it. And in those cases, this will help you… In my case, the services and service contracts are built by one dev, and the Silverlight stuff by me. To us, this way of working makes it a lot easier to handle changes to the service contracts as we go along… I can get changes by just checking out the changed interfaces without having to try and get my solution into a state where I can update my service reference.
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