Noam King's Blog

PDC09 – WCF 4.0

So WCF offers many new features like :

• Simplifying the configuration model – you can run without svc or config file. (new tags included like serviceActivation)
• Windows server Appfabric (formerly “Dublin”)
• Monitoring WCF with AppFabric. Turning on ETW (Event tracing for windows) providing a lot of information on traces we output. Associating that with the relevant monitoring program
• Can be configured from IIS in the monitoring section (Health monitoring, end-to-end Monitoring and so on…)
• Call History including each service
• Dashboard - Failed calls and service exceptions – with detailed information
• Message Pump as a Service is available in 4.o to host and extend

Scenarios :

• Basic Message routing
• Protocol Bridging
• Service Aggregation
• Versioning

The C can be IRequestReplyRouter while the B can be for example BasicHttp, you can build a routing filter table which have some filtering on diffrent actions. if you have multiple matches all the endpoint that apply get the message.

The Routing service for example can bridge from SOAP 1.1 to SOAP 1.2 on the other end, or basichttp to Net.tcp on the other end. Another common scenario is from Client Identity to another Client ID (Impersonation using WindowsIdentity)

One nice Scenarion demonstrated was Error Handling whcih you can echo the exception to different routes using the Routing Service.

The routing service is also shielding the end  client from intermediate access.

Also a nice thing is Discovery :

• Helps a lot to write scalable loosely coupled services.
• WS-Discovery : Complete implementation and it helps looking out for services.
• A client can send a probe have information about which kind of information service are we’re looking for.
• A Managed discovery model can contain a Discovery Proxy. Supress multicast messages, and let us expose metadata that we want to expose. A client can take advantatge of that information to find the service he wants.
• A Discovery contains
• Types
• List of xs:QName, and contracts
• Scopes
• list of xs:anyURI
• EndPointReference
• wsa:EndpointReference

  More on PDC later on…