Book Image

Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 Cookbook for Developing SOA Applications

By : Juntao Cheng
Book Image

Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 Cookbook for Developing SOA Applications

By: Juntao Cheng

Overview of this book

The Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 (WCF 4.0) is a .NET-based application programming interface for building and running connected systems. It enables secure and reliable communication among systems within an organization or across the Internet. This book deals with the difficult issues faced by a .NET developer while working with WCF.WCF 4.0 is a communications infrastructure that unifies a broad array of distributed systems' capabilities in a composable, extensible architecture that supports multiple transports, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. This book is a collection of focused real-world recipes and covers basic recipes on topics such as working with contracts to more advanced topics such as extending WCF runtime. By the end of this book you will have valuable information that helps transform the potentially unproductive habits of .Net developers who work with WCF.This book will take you through many concepts starting with complete support for contract-related design for WCF service development. You will learn to use WCF's built-in feature for building various service endpoints. Service hosting and configuration are important areas for building WCF services, especially at the service deployment stage, and are detailed in this book. You will find it easy to work with WCF client proxy generation and metadata publishing and discovery when you go through recipes such as customizing auto-generated service proxies.The author then discusses the exchange of data in WCF service operation features, related to WCF data serialization. You will discover some useful tips for security in WCF service development and built-in features for developing concurrency control for your services built upon it.One big plus is that you will learn to extend the existing WCF framework to achieve advanced functionality. You will find a dedicated chapter for RESTful and AJAX-enabled service development. Moving on, you will find several useful WCF service interoperability cases, which are important for a distributed service development platform. Towards the end of this book you will find some handy and useful diagnostic methods for troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 Cookbook for Developing SOA Applications
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Debugging in a Windows service host


Sometimes when developing WCF services that are hosted in a Windows Service application, we might find that it is not quite convenient to debug the service code. Though we can use WCF tracing or message logging to perform some verbose-level troubleshooting, in some cases it is still necessary to have a debugger (like Visual Studio) to do step-through code debugging against the service source code.

In this recipe, we will demonstrate how you can use Visual Studio to perform source-code debugging against a WCF service hosted in a Windows Service application.

Getting ready

Before we start debugging the Windows Service application that hosts a WCF service, there are several things we need to get ready. Here is a quick list to go through:

  • Windows Service should already be successfully compiled and set up

  • The Windows Service EXE image should be compiled either as a Debug version or a Release version with debugging information (symbols)

  • The developer needs to log...