All posts by : Thinktecture Blog

1 of 98 | Do you need a composite transport for WCF? - Have you ever come across situations in your projects where you would have needed a composite transport for WCF? WIth a composite transport I mean the ability to have transport X for inbound messages and transport Y for inbound messages.Ideally you should be able to use one-way, request-reply and duplex messaging with this composite channel (and binding).Kenny hinted at some possible way to do this - I just want to know from you whether you would really need such a channel/binding!Just drop me a line - thanks....

2 of 98 | Next Generation of Data-Centric Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 - Am 5. Mai 2008 gibt es einen Tag mit Visual Studio 2008 und SQL Server 2008 in Zürich! Next Generation of Data-Centric Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Durch den Tag führen Meinrad Weiss für SQL Server 2008 und ich für Visual Studio 2008. Die Themen: LINQ und C# 3.0 LINQ to SQL LINQ to XML ADO.NET Entity Framewok und natürlich auch SQL Server 2008: New SQL Statements (e.g. Merge) New Data Types (Date, Large UDTs, Spatial, Filestream, HierarchyId …) Resource Management Change Data Capture Data Profiling Star Join optimization Data Compression Transparent Encryption See you there! Christian...

3 of 98 | Professional C# 2008 - Professional C# 2008 is here! It contains 1800 pages although some chapters like .NET Remoting have been removed. The sixth edition was changed to include C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5! All the chapters of the book were changed to the new C# 3.0 syntax. Lambda expressions can be useful in many different cases. A big focus of the book is into .NET 3.0 and 3.5. While the previous edition had one chapter about WPF, this edition gives you a lot more information. The same is true for WCF and WF. Beside having changes in all chapters to the new C# 3.0 syntax, LINQ has some dedicated chapters: 11 - Language Integrated Query; 27 - LINQ to SQL; 29 - LINQ to XML. You can also find a preview on the ADO.NET Enti......

4 of 98 | Slides, Demos and Notes for TechDays Ghent and DevWeek London - Thanks for attending one of my sessions at the recent TechDays in Ghent or at DevWeek in London. As announced during the sessions, I have uploaded all materials and you can access them at the following locations:Slides, Samples and Notes for DevWeek London (Debugging) - ZIP, 1.10 MBSlides and Samples for TechDays in Ghent (WCF/WF Integration and Debugging) - ZIP, 1.80 MB...

5 of 98 | Domain models, services and design: about viewpoints, explicitness and first-class citizens - Please take a look at what Ganesh has to say about the principle of the "Viewpoint Flip" and how it enables you to better approach the design of services (let's not use 'SOA' too much in this context...): crisp and all-there-is-to-say.My opinion in the past few years always has been that object-oriented thinking is way misleading, to say the least, when trying to grok services: we needs to switch our viewpoint, our thinking to be *service-oriented* (take that literal).BTW: an approach like this and tooling made explicitly for this approach may help you with flipping your viewpoint....

6 of 98 | Information about .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP 1) - I had several people asking me for some details about what exactly is fixed in 3.0 SP1 - so here is some more information.Download .NET 3.0 SP 1 (2.4 MB download size)Problems that are fixed in the .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1:The .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 fixes the problems that are described in the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 932471 FIX: Error message when you try to open or to create a protected XPS document by using the XPS viewer that is included with the .NET Framework 3.0: "Cannot open this document because your permissions have expired" 932816 FIX: You experience various problems in Windows Workflow Foundation 935314 FIX: You may exp......

7 of 98 | Mapping types in a WF workflow: the MapperActivity - Rich, Jörg and myself had a lot fun building this baby: being able to have an activity to graphically map source and destination objects and properties and not having to resort to a CodeActivity. A little bit like the Biztalk Server mapping editor in a light version.Rich has all the details.Download the code for the MapperActivity....

8 of 98 | Self-Hosting Your ADO.NET Data Services ("Astoria") Services - The official ADO.NET Data Services (hm, am I the only who thinks that this - again - is not a perfect name...?) documentation doesn't alk about and doesn't show how to self-host your Astoria services - the samples and quickstarts always use ASP.NET/IIS to expose the WCF-based services that Astoria is using.By looking a bit around in Reflector I managed to create a self-hosted Astoria service which (for this example) is hosted in a Console application.We have several steps to fulfill our task:Create the ADO.NET Entity ModelImplement your Astoria ServiceConfigure endpoint(s)Create a ServiceHost instanceCreating the Entity Data Model is no special thing as well as implementing an Astoria servi......

9 of 98 | Dealing with OS privilege 'issues' in WCF Named Pipes scenarios - For whom this ever may be useful - I fighted a long time against this... (and got support from the WCF team, BTW)We have this very vast .NET 3.x end-to-end sample application which covers nearly all of the (senseful :)) features in the .NET Framework. Part of this application scenario is an upload feature where users can upload media files through a common ASP.NET frontend to the web server which then in turn talks to a WCF service that is implemented by a WF state machine workflow. The communication between the ASP.NET app on the server and the WCF Upload Service is via a Named Pipes channel (netNamedPipeBinding).Recently I ran into a problem which only occured after I moved over to Window......

10 of 98 | Running WSCF 0.7 in Visual Studio 2008 - Now with VS2008 being released obviously a lot of people also want to run WSCF in it.I have an updated WSCF.addin file which you need to replace the original one with (the location of the .addin file depends on your install option).Please note that this has not been broadly tested but customers have reported successful execution of WSCF inside VS2008.Download WSCF.addin_VS2008.zip...

11 of 98 | The future of WSCF (and the forums) - Some heads up wrt to WSCF - this is what I just posted over at the thinktecture forums (which have been quiet from our side for a loooong time, sorry).Hello everybody, first of all I really need to apologize the long silence in these forums here - sorry! To make a (quite) long story short: We will open source WSCF.blue (the version we are currently building for WCF) by the beginning of 2008. WSCF has always been a toy project for us - and as we are very busy in 'real' projects we could not work much on it, sorry again. The questions still open in this forum will likely not be addressed and answered as we are trying to figure out how to host the source code for WSCF (e.g. on Codeplex). Pleas......

12 of 98 | Sniffing WCF applications in localhost - WCF comes with handful of tracing and logging options. We can just enable it with a few lines in the config and we are good to go. Furthermore the SDK comes with a handy tool svctraceviewer.exe (for wimps ). However, out-of-the-box trace output gives us access to the data/activities only in the WCF world. For example, at some point we might want to look at the HTTP headers sent/received by the application or we might want to check out the transport level frames are written properly in a custom transport. Although this is quite easy to do with a tool like WireShark or Ethereal, it still wants us to deploy the client and the service applications in two different machines (either virtual or ......

13 of 98 | Beyond the Obvious: New Features and Fixes for WCF in .NET 3.5 - JSON support - Alright, next round in this mini-series.WCF in .NET 3.5 contains a new serializer for handling with JSON-based data. With the so called DataContractJsonSerializer we can serialize and deserialize JSON packets based on DataContract descriptions. The new serializer can work with the DataContract idea and concepts but obviously takes into account that XML (the infoset) and JSON are two totally different beasts - not just syntax-wise but especially semantically, in terms of underlying and supported concepts.For the sake of demonstrating how it work and how to use it, I have come up with a simple sample. This is a DataContract of Google's SearchMash R&D site JSON format. SearchMash is a nice......

14 of 98 | Beyond the Obvious: New Features and Fixes for WCF in .NET 3.5 - Custom username over transport security - Now, this is an easy blog post for me!My friend and thinktecture's security consultant Dominick Baier has asked me whether he can blog about this important security-related WCF topic: yep, of course :)Go and read his entry as he was one of the first to complain about this essential but from WCF v1 missing functionality. Now WCF finally supports custom username over transport security.Done....

15 of 98 | Beyond the Obvious: New Features and Fixes for WCF in .NET 3.5 - Expanded WS-* specs support - OK, here is the next one in the list of new features in WCF "v2".There are two new out-of-the-box bindings covering updated/new  WS-* specs: WS2007HttpBinding WS2007FederationHttpBinding and the respective binding elements: WS2007HttpBindingElement WS2007HttpBindingCollectionElement WS2007FederationHttpBindingElement WS2007FederationHttpBindingCollectionElement And these are the specs supported: WS-RM: Web Services Reliable Messaging v1.1 WS-SecureConversation: WS-SecureConversation v1.3 WS-Trust: WS-Trust v1.3 WS-SecurityPolicy: WS-SecurityPolicy v1.2 WS-AT: Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction) Version 1.1 WS-Coord......

16 of 98 | Microsoft starts embracing Good Old Europe - first stop: Oslo - The big shop based in Redmond announced a new and upcoming platform for SO(A) at its SOA and Business Process Conference. And its codename is Oslo.The project code-named Oslo will deliver updated messaging and workflow technologies in the next version of BizTalk Server and other products and services starting in 2009. These technologies are central to Microsoft's platform for service-oriented architectures and composite applications.Oslo is really more than just a platform, it is more than just the next version of WCF, it is more than just the next version of WF, it is more than just the next version of BizTalk Server, it is ... - well: we will see more interesting and surely more detai......

17 of 98 | Missing pieces to the SO(A) puzzle: Microsoft Managed Services Engine (MSE) - Finally, this is made public - about time guys! The Managed Services Engine from Microsoft.The Managed Services Engine (MSE) is one approach to facilitating Enterprise SOA through service virtualization. Built upon the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Microsoft Server Platform, the MSE was developed by Microsoft Services as we helped customers address the challenges of SOA in the enterprise. The MSE fully enables service virtualization through a Service Repository, which helps organizations deploy services faster, coordinate change management, and maximize the reuse of various service elements. In doing so, the MSE provides the ability to support versioning, abstraction, manag......

18 of 98 | Beyond the Obvious: New Features and Fixes for WCF in .NET 3.5 (and .NET 3.0 SP1) - With .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 being quite close to RTM these days, I thought it would be time to write a bit about what is new for WCF in .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.0 SP1. This entry just lays the ground for a couple of follow-ups which will go a bit into more details for each area. A lot of you already know the big five new features in WCF v2 (as Microsoft calls it, but frankly I think of it more as a v1.1): Durable Services: read and watch here and here and hereWorkflow Services: read and watch here and here and hereWeb Programming Model: read here and hereSupport for RSS and Atom feeds: read and watch here and herePartial Trust Support: read here and here and here ......

19 of 98 | Beyond the Obvious: New Features and Fixes for WCF in .NET 3.5 - Accessing the remote hosts address - OK, this is first short blog entry on some new features (and fixes) for WCF in .NET 3.5 and/or 3.0 SP1.I know that a number of people have been complaining bitterly about not being able to get the information of the calling remote host in WCF v1, i.e. the address or DNS name and maybe even the port number the client process is using for communication.This is now fixed and we can access this information via the OperationContext in our service implementation (or any extension in the pipeline where we already have a valid OperationContext). From there we can pull a certain message property which gets populated down in the channel layer. This property is of type RemoteEndpointMessageProperty - ......

20 of 98 | LINQ to XSD - Scott Hanselman likes the VB 9 support of integrating XML in the language. That's why he found a way to create mixed language assemblies. Another option to get strongly typed XML support to C# is by using LINQ to XSD. Using this is there still an advantage with the VB9 syntax? Christian...

21 of 98 | Releasing streams in message contracts - In a lot of WCF streaming applications it's common to see a message contract like this. [MessageContract] public class DownloadFileRequest {     [MessageHeader]     private string filename;         [MessageHeader]     private int length;         [MessageBodyMember]     private Stream fileStream;         public DownloadFileRequest()     {     }      }   This often brings up the question "How can I release the stream when t......

22 of 98 | Some insights on calling sync proxy methods from multiple threads - Update: Scott Seely explained that this is by design.  So I'm changing the title in my post. Also if you want to do this, use async methods as he pointed out.Last night my friend Michele pointed me an interesting thing on the WCF client side runtime. Basically, she had a service method like as follows.   public void SendMessage(string message) {     Console.WriteLine("SendMessage: {0}", message);     MessageBox.Show(String.Format("Received message: '{0}'", message)); }   (We know, we know, one should not display message boxes from a service method but here the idea was basically blocking the thread that executes th......

23 of 98 | It WAS(n't just) me: Extend Your WCF Services Beyond HTTP With WAS - Had a fun writing this piece with Steve and Dom.All the talk about service-oriented applications we've been hearing for the past few years has given birth to real frameworks, runtimes, and other bona fide tools for designing, building, and deploying service-oriented connected systems. A good example of this is Windows® Communication Foundation (WCF), which allows you to create services and service consumers in managed code.One strength of WCF is that you can host WCF-based services in any Windows process, including a console application, a Windows Forms app, or a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) UI application. You can even self-host WCF services in long-running Windows NT® services th......

24 of 98 | IO Worker Threads - Performance Uncovered! - Writing my last post about WCF threading internals compelled me to reveal some of the tests I did sometime back. So today we are going to see how we can optimize the CPU utilization by using IO worker threads in CLR thread pool. We are talking about CPU. Therefore I wrote this simple method to be used in my tests which does some CPU intensive operations. Note that I don't do any IO at all, not even a Console.WriteLine() and this is *very* important to assure the accuracy of the results. In my CpuIntensiveMethod method I calculate the largest Fibonacci number that is below 100 and I run this calculation for int.MaxValue number of times (I will tell you why this number is preferred). static......

25 of 98 | WCF Threading Internals (Updated) - Apologies! Last night I had accidently pressed the publish button without ticking the publish as a draft option. So those who have read this post already, sorry about the incomplete, poorly formatted text :( Along with its bunch of different features, WCF carries a lot of performance optimizations as well (you think I'm kidding? Then see it yourself http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx). As a part of this, WCF has given a lot of thought about threading model that it uses behind the scenes. At this point you might probably think; "Well… I know it uses thread pool API. There is nothing so much about it. I just know that it performs well."  Well you are correct but ......

26 of 98 | SOAP Routing – What has it gotta do with “To” header ??? - During the past few days I came across some SOAP routing intermediary implementations (of course running on WCF ;)) and each of them were trying to route the WCF messages by changing the “To” WS-Addressing header in the message. In some cases this even required completely reconstructing the message by reading its body contents. This actually made me think about the basics once again. What actually happens in the real routers? For example, does Windows TDI driver for TCP/IP change the destination IP to your router’s IP after looking at the routing table? No! Instead, the transport transmits the traffic to the appropriate IP as specified in the routing table. Then the router reads ......

27 of 98 | WCF - POX Streaming - Have you ever thought about returning a plain old XML document or some well formed HTML body snippet (for some crazy reason ;)) or your RSS feed from a WCF service? Well… I did :). In fact instead of returning the XML document itself, I wanted to stream it as the data source I was anticipating was not fast enough to provide me the complete document at once (i.e. it takes considerably more time to receive the portions of the document than the time taken for the actual transmission). So my long (well… it's not really long) journey towards a solution started with the contract (oh! Nah! I'm not going to play that famous record once again ;)). [OperationContract(Action = "*", ReplyAction="*")......

28 of 98 | Cleaning up Client Channels - Most of us have our own style of writing code we’ve been practicing throughout our career. Using the “using” statement for deterministic resource cleanup is one of my must haves in my keywords bag. But unfortunately I cannot use this to clean up the client channels I use in WCF. For example, if I use the following piece of code I’m unwittingly opening up a place where my program would simply crash. Why? using (IClientChannel client = (IClientChannel)cf.CreateChannel()) {     IFoo foo = (IFoo)client;     foo.Bar(); } The above code merely means that the following line will be executed upon exiting the using block. ((IDisposable)cl......

29 of 98 | Improving WCF Interoperability: Flattening your WSDL - WCF is surely a big step forward for having a unified communication runtime, API and hosting model. And with all these super-exciting specifications and standards supported WCF must be a killer when it comes to interoperability with other platforms, technologies, stacks. And now the communication gurus from Redmond even announced that they will support everything to imagine (OK, except CORBA, ICE and Remoting wire interop ;)) under the big communication umbrella - including popular rockstars like REST-style architectures, RSS- and Atom-driven feeds and JSON for the AJAXians. Oh, and of course they still love SOAP. You know: love is the message and the mess......

30 of 98 | Multi-threading and WCF's OperationContext - In WCF, the powerful OperationContext.Current static property lives in thread-local storage. It gets pinned to the current thread before WCF dispatches to the user code. If code for a service operation - for whatever reasons - is spawning new threads to do its work the current OperationContext object will have to be captured and needs to be passed to the other threads.Just to let you know....

31 of 98 | When you think things are not possible: WCF duplex callbacks through NATs and firewalls - safe and secure - NATs (Network Address Translation) prevents the private IP address of your home and/or work PC to be exposed to the big wild and bad Internet. The only thing nodes outside of the NAT-shielded network can see is the IP address of the NAT-capable router device. A firewall should prevent unwanted network traffic from both inside and outside of a network - and personal firewalls even scale this wish down to the single computer, again at work or at home. Cool. This is good and surely not extremely latest news for you. But this fact and these two measurements makes building certain kinds of distributed systems a little bit... well, tough, to say the least. Or as I would put it ......

32 of 98 | Web Service Software Factory v2 (for ASMX and WCF) - It is here.The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance that helps our customers quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns. The Service Factory provides guidance that addresses many of the challenges associated with building WCF and ASP.NET Web services and the components of a distributed application. These challenges include: Designing WCF and ASMX messages and service interfaces. Creating service contracts from existing WSDL and XSD files (oh yes, you can imagine how hard I was pushing that!) ......

33 of 98 | [Buch] .NET 3.0 kompakt - ... noch drei Wochen ....NET 3.0 kompakt, Ralf Westphal und Christian WeyerISBN: 978-3-8274-1458-8.NET hat sich als Plattform etabliert. Dennoch ist Orientierungshilfe für .NET nötig, denn die Plattform wächst kontinuierlich. .NET 3.0 kompakt arbeitet deshalb die großen Strömungen in der Entwicklung der .NET-Sprachen und -APIs heraus. Das daraus entstehende big picture hilft Ihnen einzuschätzen, welche Bedeutung .NET für Ihre Projekte heute und in Zukunft haben wird. Die Autoren erklären Ihnen die grundlegenden Konzepte der Plattform; dabei geht es nicht um technische Details, sondern um die Zusammenhänge in einer komplexen technologischen Landschaft. .NET 3.0 kompakt beantwortet Fragen wie......

34 of 98 | From DynWsLib to... ProxyFactory - OK, there is one library I wrote a long time ago which has a lot of fans: DynWsLib.This library is for invoking your Web Services dynamically without having to generate a client-side proxy class at design/compile time with WSCF, wsdl.exe or Visual Studio. No need to know the exact Web Service description and endpoint at compile/design time. Just get your WSDL, specify the service (binding) to use and the operations to call, and voila! The library can be especially useful in testing scenarios.Now, I have not been working on the lib for a long time (just released a .NET 2.0 compatible version some time ago).Recently, two great guys, Pascal an......

35 of 98 | Getting this damned HTTP-based WCF service running as non-admin -  Did you ever struggle to configure WCF HTTP endpoints correctly when running as a non-admin?thinktecture's latest expert addition, Dominick Baier, has build HttpSysCfg.HttpSysCfg is a tool that simplifies setting/removing/modifying ACLs on URLs for HttpListener (and thus WCF HTTP-based service and callback bindings ) which uses http.sys. You can specify specific accounts (local or domain) as well as well-known SIDs like NETWORK SERVICE or AUTHENTICATED USERS.In addition the tool allows to pick certificates from the certificate store to retrieve the thumbprint for SSL configuration....

36 of 98 | [Release] WSCF 0.7 - with support for XSD-based code generation - WSCF 0.7 was just released. Enjoy!New Features in v0.7Generate data transfer object/data contract code from schema descriptions in XSD or WSDL files - via the VS 2005 add-in and the command line tool.This build also includes several important fixes, e.g.:SOAP validation extension crashed when applied as an attribute.Could not remove multiple items at once from the operations list in step three of WSDL wizard.Byte arrays were not properly serialized when the code is generated with “Change casing” option.Code generation crashed when the configuration file contains the XML namespace information in the <configuration> element.Edit WSDL wizard crashed when the WSDL contains relative paths ......

37 of 98 | It's Indigo baby!!! - After the tremendous effort (more than 4 years I assume) by building 42 people, WCF is finally released. Get it here and it’s time make enough room for “using System.ServiceModel” line in your code (y). I really enjoyed playing around this product since it was not even publicly available (as far as I remember)… Congratulations to everyone in the Indigo team (I know this how all you guys like to name it ;))....

38 of 98 | thinktecture @ TechEd Europe Developers - It's that time of the year again and in a few days, the European thinktects will get together at Microsoft's biggest gathering of developers in Europe. This time, we have a pretty intense schedule:MondayPRE008, 12:00 - 19:00, Ingo Rammer and Christian Weyer, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) - Free Workflow Support for your ApplicationsWednesdayDEV001, 13:30 - 14:45, Neno Loje, DEMO: Adopting ClickOnce for Real World ApplicationsThursdayDEVWD15, 09:00 - 10:15, Ingo Rammer, Hardcore .NET Production DebuggingDEVWD17, 09:00 - 10:15, Neno Loje, Team System Adoption Best PracticesDEVWD15, 13:30 - 14:45, Ingo Rammer, Hardcore .NET Production Debugging (repeat)DEVWD17, 15:45 - 17:00, Neno Loje, Tea......

39 of 98 | Straight-forward WCF duplex communication over MSMQ? - My friend Mike Taulty has recently posted a cool post about his attempt to create a WCF extension to leverage the duplex programming model over MSMQ. This is a really interesting area (and of course has a huge potential) and at thinktecture labs I and Buddhike spent a great deal of time for research on this very topic. On our way to a solution we came across exactly the same issues that Mike points out in his post. And it's kind of funny that the solution he's giving was the one came to our heads at the first place too. Although it's a very decent attempt, this has a major architectural flaw because of MSMQ's inherent asynchronous and decoupled model and the handshaking nature of the RM pro......

40 of 98 | What's in a name? "Generate..." - "... Data Types""... Data Contracts""... Data Transfer Objects"Please help us in finding the optimal way of naming the major new feature in WSCF 0.7. Go and vote by leaving a comment for this post. Thanks!Note: we do not support WCF with WSCF 0.7, but Data Contract is in this case rather a common term....

41 of 98 | WSCF 0.7: Looking for three *thorough* testers! - OK, you may have realized that WSCF is a side-project these days - mostly due to the fact that we are deeply involved in very interesting projects in the service-orientation and workflow space.But now we found some free time to integrate the most wanted feature into 0.7:Right-click on an .XSD in VS 2005 and generate .NET (data transfer object) code from it (with support also in the command line tool).For this, I would need three thorough testers!Please get in touch with me via the Contact form and we will figure out how you could help us (please keep in mind that you would need to really test WSCF 0.7 against all the XSD you have and give immediate feedback).Thanks in advance....

42 of 98 | Off to Basta!2006 - In a few hours I'm off to Basta!2006. I'm really looking forward as this year thinktecture has a massive presence - even running in some parallel slots - at this conference. It's also the first time that the four of us in Europe meet in the current line-up as Neno Loje joined a few weeks ago to add his great VS Team System experience to our team.Sept 18: Neno Loje - Full Day Tutorial on Team Development with Visual Studio 2005 Team SystemSept 1910:15-11:30 - Neno Loje - Visual Studio 2005 Team System10:15-11:30 - Ingo Rammer - Hardcore Production Debugging14:15-15:30 - Christian Nagel - C++/CLI17:15-18:35 - Christian Nagel - System.TransactionsSept 2010:15-11:30 - Christian Weyer - Windows ......

43 of 98 | Microsoft's Open Specification Promise - what we all wanted to see - Not much buzz around it, but this is what at least I wanted to see.Microsoft is making a personal promise to every individual and organization in the world that they can use any patented technology Microsoft has that is necessary to implement the Web Services specifications.The Promise pledges that any patented technology that Microsoft owns that is necessary to implement a list of covered specifications related to Web Services is available for use in any technology that implements the specification.  It applies to 35 web services specifications, including SOAP, WSDL and all of the advanced Web Services specifications.It applies to all individuals and organizations in all countries. No......

44 of 98 | Beyond [DataContract] - serializing data with WCF - Just a quick note for everyone doing first steps in WCF service contract design.Usually you get introduced to WCF by using a Data Contract (denoted by the [DataContract] attribute) which internally is used by the new DataContractSerializer.But there is more than 'just' [DataContract] which is supported by the DataContractSerializer, like [Serializable], IXmlSerializable and [MessageContract]. Insteed of copying here the supported features, I am going to link to Sowmny's excellent articles. A must read....

45 of 98 | Title: Defining KnownTypes in a configuration file - Caution: The following is undocumented and might be changed or removed at any time without notice. WCF's serialization of data contracts supports the transmission of derived types which have not been available when the original application (or just contract) has been built. In the following example, ApplicationExtensionObject is just a placeholder instead of which a derived class should be transferred at runtime. [DataContract] public class Customer { [DataMember] public string Firstname; [DataMember] public string Lastname; [DataMember] public Address DefaultDeliveryAddress; [DataMember] public Address DefaultBillingAddress; [DataMember] public ......

46 of 98 | Start ServiceHosts for all configured Services - As WCF has reached RC1 stage, I find myself cleaning up a few bits of older WCF code. While playing around with it, I always found myself having to start more and more ServiceHosts for different configurations. The following snippet iterates over all <service> entries in configuration/system.serviceModel and opens a ServiceHost for each of them.using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Reflection;using System.Configuration;using System.ServiceModel.Configuration;using System.ServiceModel;public class ServiceHostGroup{    static List<ServiceHost> _hosts = new List<ServiceHost>();    private static void OpenHost(Type t) &nb......

47 of 98 | WCF server startup slow on W2K3 in VM - Just a quick and unrelated tip: If you - like I'm doing it right now - run a WCF server in a Virtual Machine running W2K3 Server and your VM is supposed to be standalone and not part of domain you might experience a delay when a WCF server application is starting. When looking at the issue with Wireshark/Ethereal (yes, I do what I preach and a Network Sniffer really is one of the first things I use when I experience some kind of unexpected delay ;-)) I noticed that the machine is broadcasting eight Netbios name service queries on its internal subnet to find a domain controller. These queries time out after about eight seconds, but I really didn't want to wait that long.I'm sure that there a......

48 of 98 | Coming to Brussels on September 25 - As David has already blogged, I will be back in Brussels on September 25. I think that's great as I really like the city and wasn't able to make it to the last DevDays there. Microsoft is hosting (for free!) a full day on .NET Framework 3.0 in which Peter Himschoot will present on Windows Presentation Foundation and CardSpace, and I'll focus on Windows Communication Foundation and Workflow Foundation. It's going to be fun. (And: You can still vote for the session contents!) ...

49 of 98 | WCF, IIS7, WAS and Vista - really - Great information over at the IIS7 web site. If you want to know which IIS7 feature will be supported in which Vista version, they have an overview. If you want to know how to exactly and step-by-step install and configure IIS7 on Vista, they show you. And finally, if you really wanna know about the marriage of WCF, WAS and IIS7, go ahead and read this thorough whitepaper. Good stuff. ...

50 of 98 | Flexible notifications with WCF duplex communication in your application architecture - OK, this does not happen too often, but I am copying here part of a thread and especially my answer from the MSDN WCF forums. Without further ado, let's go... ------- Hello All, I'm looking for some design guidance about WCF. I want to build an application where my business objects live in one process (the server). I want to be able to attach arbitrary UI’s (or interested parties) to this process to display information about the business objects, as well as manipulate them. These UI’s could live on the same machine, or on other machines. I would like provide a uniform interface to these UI’s regardless of where they live (same machine or other