November, 2010

Recently I had a customer email me looking for information on how to send and receive large files with a WCF HTTP service. WCF supports streaming specifically for these types of scenarios.  Basically with streaming support you can create a service operation which receives a stream as it’s incoming parameter and returns a stream as it’s return value (a few other types like Message and anything implementing IXmlSerializable are also supported). MSDN describes how streaming in WCF works here ,...

Do you use WCF within your organization either for internal apis for exposing services and functionality to 3rd parties? We’re looking to connect with customers using our stuff in the real world so we can understand your use cases, the things you’ve liked about WCF and where you’d like to see us improve / go further. If interested, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from you. Blog Post by: .NET Connected Framework Team

Managing multiple asynchronous operations in WCF is currently very complex regardless of whether you use the existing event or Begin/End asynchronous patterns. In fact, both internal and external customers frequently ask about how to implement simple coordination of WCF operations, and even though sending multiple requests to a WCF backend is a core scenario, WCF does not provide a satisfactory solution. The amount of code needed to facilitate even simple coordination tasks is large and prone to...

When I was developing my demos for PDC10 I ran into a problem.  I was using some new HTTP activities for the next release of WF and invoking a simple console application with an HTTP POST.  For some strange reason I ran into the following error Request POST http://127.0.0.1:8080/Marketing HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/xml Host: 127.0.0.1:8080 Content-Length: 91 Expect: 100-continue Connection: Keep-Alive <string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/ ">Phyllis...

At PDC in my session  “Building Web APIs for the Highly Connected Web” we announced WCF Web APIs, new work we are doing to make HTTP first class in WCF. In this post I am going to describe what we are doing and why. If you are saying, “just show me the bits”, then just head on over to wcf.codeplex.com our new site that we just launched! Why HTTP? HTTP is ubiquitous and it’s lightweight.  Every consumer that connects to the web understands it, every browser supports it, and the infrastructure...

I finished Part 1 with two questions, which aren’t going to make sense if you haven’t read Part 1 already. What does the constructor look like? What exactly does the CacheMetadata() implementation look like? Let’s start with a possible constructor. It hardcodes a lot, maybe too much:     public sealed class NativeHandleRequest : NativeActivity     {         public Activity Body { get ; set ; }        ...

[Here’s a post covering some custom activity scenarios that should be pretty easy when you know how, but the problem is learning how. Including scheduling, variables, and implementation children.] Some popular things to do when writing custom activities seem to be 1) creating a group of activities which should execute together in a fixed pattern 2) creating ‘customized built-in’ activities, for example wrapping a messaging activity, or preconfiguring sendReply and receive to point to each other 3...

Not to forget the interests of regular readers, you can get some of the latest WF news from Ron Jacob’s Windows Workflow Foundation Futures PDC talk. Updating with the direct link: http://player.microsoftpdc.com/Session/3b87c17b-a218-40d3-984f-78a012331dee should work. WARNING! There’s over 11 minutes of intro music so please skip past. There’s some introductory information and motivation for workflow during the first 10 minutes after the intro music (workflow foundation pasts and presents). Then...

PDC is done! To me PDC is a major disclosure event - where afterwards we minions are finally able to mention the things that were hidden waiting in the wings for the big unveil. But are now happily in the public domain. And it’s also a good chance now to see lots of interesting demos, and pick up info or tutorials on new technologies from the session videos… My new interest since Workflow is… “Composite Applications”. At least that’s the current name. Basically it’s a new way to design and manage...

NoWhen I first heard about the new async functionality in C# at PDC 2010 last week, my immediate reaction was; how can this be used to ease the development of asynchronous WCF/WF services (and clients). Well, it turns out that someone on Microsoft has thought about the same thing; in the samples that accompanies the [...] Blog Post by: larsw