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

Returning a DataTable/DataSet in a service operation


A very frequently asked question in a WCF Data transfer service is how to return a DataTable/DataSet in a WCF service operation. The DataTable class is a member of the System.Data namespace within the .NET framework class library. You can create and use a DataTable independently or as a member of a DataSet, and DataTable objects can also be used in conjunction with other .NET framework objects.

There are various possible solutions for DataTable or DataSet transferring in a WCF service; we will go through the most common ones in this recipe.

Getting ready

In our sample service, we will demonstrate several means to return data from a DataTable to client consumers. The sample DataTable consists of three simple columns, as shown in the following screenshot.

How to do it...

Let's go through three commonly used methods for returning data from ADO.NET DataTable/DataSet objects

  • Directly return a DataTable within a DataSet container.

    If both the WCF...