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Four more webcasts are coming this month to talk about some of the new web service features in Orcas. Each webcast is aimed at developers and lasts 60-90 minutes. Transactional Windows Communication Foundation Services with Juval Lowy (Level 200) Monday, July 07, 2008 10:00 AM Pacific Time Transactions are the key to building robust, high quality service-oriented applications. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a simple, declarative transaction support for service developers, enabling you to configure parameters such as enlistment and voting, all outside the scope of your service. In addition, WCF allows client applications to create transactions and to propagate transactions across service boundaries over a variety of transports. In this webcast, we explain how to configure transaction flow at the binding, contract, and service level, local versus distributed transactions, setting of service transactions, declarative voting, and the available configurations that best fit various application scenarios. Using Windows Workflow Foundation to Build Services with Jon Flanders (Level 300) Wednesday, July 09, 2008 10:00 AM Pacific Time Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a programming model, set of tools, and runtime environment which allows you to write declarative and reactive programs for Windows operating systems. WF is part of the Microsoft .NET Runtime, and it first appeared in Microsoft .NET 3.0. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is also a programming model, set of tools, and a runtime that first appeared in .NET 3.0. WCF is a framework for building applications that can communicate with each other over varied network protocols. In .NET 3.5, these programming models came closer together to allow easy integration, including allowing WF instances to use WCF to communicate to remote endpoints and allowing WF instances to become the service implementation for WCF endpoints. This is accomplished by two new Activities: ReceiveActivity and SendActivity as well as a new hosting infrastructure for service endpoints. In this webcast, we look at both sides of this integration to give you an overview of how to build WF/WCF applications. WCF Extensibility Deep Dive with Jesus Rodriguez (Level 400) Friday, July 11, 2008 10:00 AM Pacific Time Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a rich messaging framework that extends beyond its capabilities for modeling and implementing services. One of the aspects where WCF really shines when compared with competitive Read More...
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I've been playing with the DataContractJsonSerializer that comes with Orcas recently to produce some JSON-based services. DataContractJsonSerializer works just like any other XmlObjectSerializer, except of course that the serialization output looks nothing like XML when written out. {"content1":"this is content","content2":"this is more content","version":1} If you attempt to push the serialized output through an XML reader or writer and examine it though, that works too through some simple but seemingly magical transformations that happen behind the scenes. < root type ="object" > < content1 > this is content </ content1 > < content2 > this is more content </ content2 > < version type ="number" > 1 </ version > </ root > This transformation trick is one that we've used elsewhere as well to give the appearance of a consistent and highly-structured set of data formats while not actually incurring the costs of that structure. That led me to start trying to observe when the simpler structure of JSON actually provides a performance advantage over the standard DataContractSerializer. I've found that while JSON wins in terms of size, it doesn't always win in terms of serialization speed. Here were the observations that I made. DataContractJsonSerializer tended to be faster for small and simple workloads. When the number of types was small and the types didn't have very many members, DataContractJsonSerializer could beat DataContractSerializer by 25%. This was most often true when the bulk of the object data was string content. On the other hand, DataContractSerializer caught up and then started winning as the types got more complicated. I also noticed that there were some primitive types, such as floating-point numbers, where DataContractSerializer always had a significant advantage. DataContractSerializer could turn a 25% loss into a 25% win just by changing several of the fields of a small type to doubles. This shows that performance is a very hard thing to predict without taking measurements. I would have expected DataContractJsonSerializer to consistently win given the simpler and smaller output format but I was able to find several data contracts taken from popular services for which that wasn't true. Next time: Timeout Error Messages Read More...
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Spotted on Aaron Stebner's blog last night is an article for repairing or uninstalling Orcas from the command line . Having these commands handy is tremendously useful when you need to test installation and machine configuration issues. It's a lot easier to work with the installer than to set up a virtual machine for simple projects. Read More...
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WebServiceHost is a new feature in Orcas that makes it easy to put up simple web services that are built on HTTP and POX. However, there's no requirement that forces you to build REST and POX services using WebServiceHost. WebServiceHost exists to make a simple case easy, but you're not locked into using that approach if the simple case doesn't apply to you. Here's everything behind WebServiceHost if you want to build your own. WebServiceHostFactory exists to bootstrap WebServiceHost when building a web site in IIS WebServiceHost disables any service metadata or help pages so that they don't steal any part of the URI space under your web site WebServiceHost generates endpoints for all of your contract types with a WebHttpBinding so that you don't have to describe the service endpoints in a configuration file WebServiceHost adds a WebHttpBehavior to all of your service endpoints so that Get and Invoke operations in your service contract work without any additional setup Next time: Security Session Inactivity Read More...
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How should I represent raw XML content in a contract? It seems like it would be really easy to have within the large blob of XML that makes up a message, a small blob of XML. However, it's more challenging to deal with that situation than you might expect because that small blob of XML has to be handled unlike everything else. With most contracts you can chew along the message and place each of the resulting bits in its proper place. When trying to preserve the raw XML though, you have to know when not to chew. In your contract you should use XMLSerializer formatted fields to turn off most of the unnecessary thinking regarding the XML content. Then, XmlSerializer knows about special handling for XmlElement and XmlAttribute to complete the mapping between pieces in the message and fields in your type. These two types work under the covers with XmlSerializer even though they don't implement the standard contract for serialization. With Orcas, you can also use the new XElement type that is defined by XLinq. XLinq doesn't have any deep integration with XmlSerializer but XElement directly implements the IXmlSerializable contract to make things work. Next time: Mapping Client Certificates Read More...
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Five webcasts are coming this month to talk about some of the new web service features in Orcas. Each webcast is aimed at developers and lasts 60-90 minutes. Beyond the Endpoints with Windows Communication Foundation with Juval Lowy (Level 100) Wednesday, June 18, 2008 10:00 A.M.-11:30 A.M. Pacific Time Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is more than just the next-generation platform for building connected systems. In many respects, WCF is the next development platform for Windows-based applications, providing system features that are presently crafted by hand on top of the Microsoft .NET Framework and the Windows operating system. In this webcast, we describe the power and productivity of WCF and demonstrate how it is a "better .NET Framework." We focus on the key system features of WCF so you can make educated decisions on aligning your product road map with WCF and assess the advantages of using WCF. We begin the webcast with a brief overview of WCF and the WCF architecture, and then we demonstrate data contract tolerance, instance management, transaction propagation, automatic synchronization, queued calls, and automatic security. geekSpeak: Workflow Services in .NET 3.5 with Jon Flanders (Level 200) Wednesday, June 18, 2008 12:00 P.M.-1:00 P.M. Pacific Time Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) are powerful technologies that were first introduced in the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0. In release 3.5 of the .NET Framework, these two technologies work even better together. In this installment of geekSpeak, Jon Flanders from Pluralsight introduces you to workflow services , and he describes how workflow services unites WCF and WF and provides great new features for building solutions. Your hosts for this geekSpeak are Lynn Langit and Glen Gordon. Calling Services from Silverlight 2.0 with Jon Flanders (Level 300) Monday, June 23, 2008 9:00 A.M.-10:00 A.M. Pacific Time Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 browser plug-in provides an environment for building rich Internet applications (RIAs). Traditionally, these types of applications relied heavily on services such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) for their functionality. In this webcast, we look at the facilities built into Silverlight 2.0 for calling services, and we discuss the options for implementing these services. Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation Integration in Depth with Jesus Rodriguez (Level 400) Wednesday, June 25, 2008 10:00 Read More...
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When I talked about some of the enhancements in Orcas, I left out a performance improvement for services that use a large number of known types. There are various ways of defining the known types for a service operation, and all of the known type collections are aggregated together for use the first time that an unknown type needs to become a known type. The performance of that first call grew increasingly worse rather quickly as the number of known types increased, although the performance of successive calls was not affected. This slowdown was fixed in Orcas (you don't need Orcas SP1 to get it). If you are seeing a pattern of slow first calls that is improved by not declaring known types, then you may want to see if installing Orcas makes your first call faster. Next time: Common Setup Tasks Read More...
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Yesterday, a beta version of the first service pack for .Net Framework 3.5 was released including fixes and new features for WCF. The new features are primarily around serialization and tooling although there are enhancements scattered throughout many features. All of the files are available for public download. Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta Readme In addition to not being compatible with the previously released Silverlight SDK, there are two known issues for the beta. HTTP POX is not composable with One-way The OneWayBindingElement class is designed to create client-side channels that expect null messages as responses; otherwise, it fails with a ProtocolException error. Standard message encoders return messages that have a non-empty message body. However, in a POX/REST scenario, you may want to process messages based solely on the contents of HTTP headers (for example, 200 for success; otherwise, failure), rather than the message body. Because message encoders do not let you return null messages based on HTTP headers in these scenarios, it is not possible to use OneWay contracts on the client side. To resolve this issue: In the channel stack configuration, add a filter channel between OneWayBindingElement and HttpTransportBindingElement that checks the HTTP response status code. If the code indicates success, it returns null; otherwise, it returns the original response message. The final configuration appears as follows, with a custom binding element that filters the responses. CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding( new OneWayBindingElement(), new MyMessageFilterByHttpHeaders(), new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement(), new HttpTransportBindingElement() ); binding.Elements.Find<MessageEncodingBindingElement>().MessageVersion = MessageVersion.None; Windows XP issue when AllowNtlm is set to false In WCF, if you specify the clientCredentialtype property as Windows and negotiate the client credentials, you can enable NTLM to be used as a negotiation package. The default behavior for WSHttpBinding and WS2007WttpBinding is to negotiate Windows client credentials. You can control this behavior in WCF by modifying the allowNtlm property. In the .config file, put the clientCredentials tag in an endpointBehavior tag. In the code, set a property on WindowsClientCredentials. There is a behavior change in SP1 that affects WCF running on all versions of Windows later than Windows XP. When allowNtlm Read More...
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When debugging a WCF project in Visual Studio the WCF Service Host starts up to host my service. How do I stop this from happening so that I can use my own service host? One of the new tools in Orcas is the WCF Service Host that allows you to automatically host and test a service that you've implemented. The WCF Service Host comes along with some of the specialized WCF project templates in Visual Studio, such as WCF Service Library and Syndication Service Library. If you've picked one of these project templates, then I don't know of a good way of disabling the service host. This should be fixed in SP1 by adding some user interface to toggle the service host on and off. In the meantime, you can perform some surgery on the project file to work around this. If you look inside the actual csproj file for your project, then you'll see a PropertyGroup section that defines the project. < PropertyGroup > < Configuration Condition =" '$(Configuration)' == '' " > Debug </ Configuration > < Platform Condition =" '$(Platform)' == '' " > AnyCPU </ Platform > < ProductVersion > 9.0.21022 </ ProductVersion > < SchemaVersion > 2.0 </ SchemaVersion > < ProjectGuid > {3CC71D2E-7EC2-46B5-B985-F889B65E3DCD} </ ProjectGuid > < OutputType > Library </ OutputType > < AppDesignerFolder > Properties </ AppDesignerFolder > < RootNamespace > WcfServiceLibrary1 </ RootNamespace > < AssemblyName > WcfServiceLibrary1 </ AssemblyName > < ProjectTypeGuids > {3D9AD99F-2412-4246-B90B-4EAA41C64699};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC} </ ProjectTypeGuids > < StartArguments > /client:"WcfTestClient.exe" </ StartArguments > < TargetFrameworkVersion > v3.5 </ TargetFrameworkVersion > </ PropertyGroup > The ProjectTypeGuids list is what controls these special features of projects. Removing the {3D9AD99F-2412-4246-B90B-4EAA41C64699} entry from the list will disable automatic service hosting. Next time: Debugging Type Loading Read More...
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Today wraps up the series on detailed messaging changes in Orcas. You can get the whole series here as well as the previous high-level overview of new Orcas features I did. Messaging Additions in Orcas Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 2 Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 3 Now, let's go on with the list. I've got one last feature to cover and then some of the more notable bug fixes that were reported by customers. If you need one of the bug fixes, you can get them by either installing Orcas or the .NET framework 3.0 service pack. Enhancements for web programming . RSS and ATOM syndication, partial trust, JSON, AJAX, and HTTP application programming are all covered reasonably well in the high-level overview so I didn't break them out this time. We no longer make shutdown slow. It took a somewhat rare machine configuration but the various services we run for port sharing and activation could prevent the machine from shutting down until they timed out. Copying a POX message. There aren't any standard channels that buffer messages and are used with HTTP under MessageVersion.None. However, if you write a message inspector, then you need to copy the message before reading it and that now works. Starting a listener while hosted in IIS. I don't recommend starting an independent web service from inside of a web service hosted in IIS. We've made the threading work in this service-within-service case but you're still at the mercy of IIS deciding when to deactivate the outermost service. Emptier messages. When doing POX we have to surface messages even when the HTTP payload is empty so that you have an object to get your HTTP message properties from. Until now though, when we did that conversion those messages would stop reporting that they were empty. Next time: Private Data Members Read More...
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Now that I've covered several of the new feature additions in Orcas I also want to include mention of some of the fixes done to improve interoperability with other platforms. Allowing an empty SOAPAction. Previously we required that the HTTP SOAPAction header exactly match the addressing action. We now let you process messages with an empty SOAPAction as many other systems were processing messages based only on the addressing action. Handling empty messages that claim to be chunked. Previously we weren't able to process messages that said that they were chunked but didn't have any content. Some systems were transmitting every HTTP message as chunked (even the empty ones) so we now handle this case gracefully. Flexible content types. Previously we required that the character set parameter for an HTTP content type be the first parameter in the list. Some systems were generating content types with additional parameters in various orders so we've removed any dependency on the parameter order. Parsing MTOM includes. Previously we only supported the canonicalized format for the Include element of an MTOM message. Another system was generating MTOM messages where the elements were not canonicalized so we've added support to read those messages. Next time: Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 4 Read More...
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Continuing on with the theme of messaging additions in Orcas, today I'll look at some more of the protocols and community-driven features that were added. WS Atomic Transaction 1.1 . Transactions tie together multiple participants in a distributed application. The framework of transactions is built on various coordination protocols between parties. Transactions are a kind of coordination in which either all or none of the parties agree to perform an action. Validation for issued token certificates . We've added support for configuring the certificate validation policy for issued token authentication, similar to the configuration for other certificates that are used for service credentials. Flowing SAML tokens. We've added support to flow a SAML assertion without having to re-sign the token. This allows these assertions to be handled by proxies without special configuration. Using message contents for authorization . We've added support to ServiceAuthorizationManager for performing access checks that make use of the body of the message. WS Secure Conversation 1.3 . A secure conversation is an exchange of multiple, protected messages. Using a conversation mechanism allows a security context to be established across several messages, which performs better than having to exchange security keys with every message. WS Trust 1.3 . Building a secure conversation requires that the two parties exchange security credentials. In order to perform this exchange, the two parties need to establish a trust relationship where they can evaluate the assertions made by the other side. The protocols that I've talked about today and last time are available through the new WS2007HttpBinding and WS2007FederationHttpBinding as updates to the previous web service standard bindings. Next time: Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 3 Read More...
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I've had scattered posts in the past talking about the messaging features and enhancements in Orcas. Over the next few days I'm going to be doing a bit of consolidating to organize that information into a few listings of the top changes using reasonably sized chunks. Today I'll look at some of the new protocols and community-driven features that were added. Remote client address . We've added capture of the address of the remote endpoint for TCP and HTTP connections so that you can act on the client address in your service code. Custom password validator for HTTP . We've added support for attaching the existing UserNamePasswordValidator class that performs password-based authentication to the basic HTTP security system. WS Addressing 1.0 Metadata . While the base addressing protocol provides a transport-independent way of describing the address of a service, metadata provides additional descriptive capabilities through WSDL and policy to specify how addresses should be used. WS Policy 1.5 . Policy is a description language for requirements and capabilities that is used to define a model for web service interaction. WS Reliable Messaging 1.1 . Reliable messaging provides a protocol for reliably transmitting messages between a pair of endpoints despite system or network failures. Next time: Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 2 Read More...
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How do I manually manage the context when sharing a client object? The default mode when using a context binding is for the context to be managed internally by the context channel underneath the client proxy. This is similar to how by default cookies are managed by an HTTP channel to send and receive cookie context. With an HTTP channel you can disable automatic cookie management and control the context yourself. There is a similar process that you can use to take control for a context binding. Here's a comparison of the two processes. You can get the code for HTTP by using the link above and with the further details on custom cookie handling so I won't print it again. With HTTP, you first need to turn off automatic cookie handling by setting the AllowCookies property on the HTTP transport binding element to false. With a context binding, you first need to turn off automatic context handling by setting the Enabled property on the context manager to false. IContextManager contextManager = channel.GetProperty<IContextManager>(); contextManager.Enabled = false ; Then, for HTTP you attach an HttpRequestMessageProperty that contains the desired cookies to a message using an OperationContextScope. With a context binding, you use the same OperationContextScope approach but attach the appropriate ContextMessageProperty instead. using ( new OperationContextScope(client.InnerChannel)) { ContextMessageProperty contextProperty = new ContextMessageProperty(contextData); OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageProperties[ContextMessageProperty.Name] = contextProperty; client.DoOperation(); } Next time: Messaging Additions in Orcas Read More...
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What channels can be used in a context binding? The primary limitation for building a context binding is that the channel stack has to have the right shape. The context exchange protocol used by a context binding requires that the first invoked operation be a request-reply operation. This is so that the initial context can be established. In order to support a request-reply operation, the channel stack needs to support one of a particular set of shapes. There are currently five channel shapes allowed when using a context binding: IRequestChannel IRequestSessionChannel IReplyChannel IReplySessionChannel IDuplexSessionChannel The request and reply channel shapes are paired for the client and server so on any particular endpoint there are three valid channel shapes. Conditions are limited further if you want to use HTTP cookies as your context exchange mechanism rather than the default of SOAP headers. In that case it's no longer possible to use a duplex channel so you're limited to variations on the request-reply message exchange pattern. Next time: Manual Context Management Read More...
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