I've just managed to get the .NET 3.5 style of WCF Web Programming Model services to work inside an EPiServer 5 R2 site on IIS 7 and Windows 2008.  I had a few difficulties finding out how to integrate the new model into IIS/ASP.NET and then further problems getting it working in EPiServer.  Here, I outline the solution. Context I'm currently designing a site that will be using the Akamai Edge Suite of technologies (www.akamai.com) and so I desire that all client access is through the caching layer.  Additionally, I'm motivated towards a REST model for web services to support a greater degre... [More]

Overview Following my earlier post about WCF service design guidelines, I've created some WCF code snippets to simplify the implementation of services, operations, messages and data contracts. Resources Download the snippet here: wcf-services.snippet (note that you will need to save the file with the .snippet extension; I've had to rename the extension for this server)  Content I've included the full content here, partly to support searches: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet"> ... [More]

Overview Microsoft has released an article comparing the performance of WCF and .NET 2.0 distributed application technologies such as ASMX web services, WSE web services, COM+ applications and .NET 2.0 remoting.  The results are surprising. Detail You can find the article here: A Performance Comparison of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) with Existing Distributed Communication Technologies (Saurabh Gupta, MSDN, February 2007) Comment The main findings from my perspective are as follows: There really isn't a good case to use ASMX or WSE in preference to WCF in new pr... [More]

Overview I'm currently writing a service that needs to provide long-lived callback behaviour to a large number of clients.  In this case, the WCF session semantics are not appropriate and so I can't use the ServiceContractAttribute's CallbackContract property. Why not sessions? In my scenario, WCF sessions are unwarranted because: WCF sessions correlate a group of messages, however I only want to group a single pair WCF sessions provide ordered delivery, however this is not needed WCFsessions are explicitly initiated and terminated by the calling application ... [More]

Overview I've recently begun playing around with developing an SOA solution using WCF. My focus is on implementing a service that is loosely coupled, autonomous, highly configurable and reusable.  I might tell you more about it in a later blog, but for now I want to describe some of the design issues involved. Architecting SOA solutions This post is not a replacement for a good book on SOA, and I highly recommend Thomas Erl's various books on the subject.  You can find out more at http://www.soabooks.com.  I've also had the misfortune to read some bad books on the subject, so be careful whe... [More]

Overview If you are interested in service-oriented architecture, including analysis and design, then have a look at this book... Reference   Service-Oriented Architecture Concepts, Technology and Design Thomas Erl, Prentice Hall, 2005 ISBN 0-13-185858-0 Title Service-Oriented Architecture Subtitle Concepts, Technology, and Design Author(s) Thomas Erl Publishe... [More]