Aaron Lerch » wcf http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:45:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Enabling WCF services within IIS on Windows Vista http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/12/11/enabling-wcf-services-within-iis-on-windows-vista/ http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/12/11/enabling-wcf-services-within-iis-on-windows-vista/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:17:10 +0000 aaron http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/12/11/enabling-wcf-services-within-iis-on-windows-vista/ If you installed IIS on Windows Vista after you installed .NET 3.0, like I did, you’ll notice that any references to the .svc file will fail, typically with a 404 not found. It’s easy to see that the .svc mappings aren’t installed, but without consulting some documentation it’s not abundantly clear how to install them. If you’re running Vista, you enable the activation service by turning on a windows feature: Windows Communication Foundation HTTP Activation. You can access the “Turn Windows features on or off” option from your Control Panel.

Hope this saves someone else the time I wasted. :)

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]]> http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/12/11/enabling-wcf-services-within-iis-on-windows-vista/feed/ 2 URI “Purity” http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/uri-purity/ http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/uri-purity/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 23:14:00 +0000 aaron http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/uri-purity/ In my article on REST + WCF, I mentioned something I called “URI Purity”:

“URI purity”, as I define it, refers to the degree with which implementation details “leak” into the URI of a resource. (read more…)

Interesting that I come across this post tonight by Jon Flanders [via] where he created an HttpModule to rewrite the .svc extension out of a web request. The one thing his module doesn’t do, unfortunately, is rewrite the outgoing response back to the client – so if a resource is created, its URI returned in the response would still include “.svc”.

Scott Guthrie (and many others) have already posted on some good resources (and rationale) for URL rewriting, so I won’t repeat all that here. Just Google “url rewrite asp.net” and you’re on your way.

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]]> http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/uri-purity/feed/ 1 Creating RESTful Web Services with WCF 3.5 http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/creating-restful-web-services-with-wcf-35/ http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/creating-restful-web-services-with-wcf-35/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:43:00 +0000 aaron http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/creating-restful-web-services-with-wcf-35/ My inaugural article titled “Creating RESTful Web Services with Windows Communication Foundation” is up at developer.com. Go give it a read, if you dare! I recently spent quite a while digging into the REST implementation in WCF 3.5 (Beta 2): WebGet/WebInvoke, WebOperationContext, WebServiceHost and their ilk. It’s some pretty interesting stuff.

Feel free to make jabs comments on my article here or on the developer.com website… I welcome all feedback! Got questions? I’m happy to answer anything I can, and help research the stuff I can’t.

For the article I put together a working (simple) blog engine service, which was fun. You can download the source on the last page of the article. I got to play around with a glimpse into what LINQ can do–powerfull stuff. Phil Haack was right, implementing a blog engine really is today’s “Hello World”.

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]]> http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/creating-restful-web-services-with-wcf-35/feed/ 7 A humble WCF feature request (or four) http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/07/16/a-humble-wcf-feature-request-or-four/ http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/07/16/a-humble-wcf-feature-request-or-four/#comments Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:43:00 +0000 aaron http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/07/16/a-humble-wcf-feature-request-or-four/ Since Steve Maine’s excellent and informative blog appears to be down tonight, I’m posting my request here for all to see.  I’d like to see two things for WCF in .NET 3.5.

First is response message encoding specified per service operation.  If we’re really creating a RESTful service, then it makes sense to be able to change encoding formats for given URI “extensions”, and not having to create different endpoints for each format.  So what I mean is that “http://aaronlerch.com/blog/tags/WCF.rss” should return RSS, “http://aaronlerch.com/blog/tags/WCF.json” should return JSON, and “http://aaronlerch.com/blog/tags/WCF.xml” should return XML.  Simple as that.  Twitter’s API does this, as I’m sure many others do, and I really like it.  It fits with the URI paradigm of readability and just makes logical sense.  I could only find one post out there that even hints at this ability (emphasis mine):

  [ServiceContract]
  public interface IGameStatistics
  {
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "Rankings/{player}")]
    SyndicationFeedFormatter<SyndicationFeed> GetPlayerStats(string player);

    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
      UriTemplate = "PlayerSearch?GameType={gameType}&SortAscending={ascending}")]
    Player[] Search(int gameType, bool ascending);
  }

I’m fairly certain this functionality will be in the final shipping bits, if not the next CTP/Beta, but I wanted to voice my opinion just in case.

Secondly, along similar lines to #1, I want to be able to specify an XSLT transform that gets applied to the POX response from a service operation.  I’d even be satisfied with extensibility points added to the plumbing code that exists to support the WebGet/WebInvoke attributes.  But best case scenario I’d like to be able to write something like this:

  [ServiceContract]
  public interface IBlogService
  {
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml, XsltResource = "blogtag.xslt", UriTemplate = "tags/{tag}")]
    BlogEntry[] GetTaggedBlogEntries(string tag);

    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "tags/{tag}.json")]
    BlogEntry[] GetTaggedBlogEntriesAsJson(string tag);

    etc…
  }

I request this because implementing the same type of friendly URI usage in ASP.NET requires all sorts of fun URL rewriting.  That, and my web service would need to be hosted elsewhere, or on another port, or in a different web, etc. Why not combine the two? If I can specify an XSLT transform (optionally) I can combine my HTML site with my XML service and leverage the work I’ve already done to achieve URI bliss.

This is actually something I think I could accomplish on my own with the tools and extension points currently available, and I I’m going to explore that. I hesitate to do too much work since in the next release it could all be for naught. (Okay, honestly I just hesitate to do too much work. Period. :) )

And hey, while I’m at it, why can’t I request one more thing? I’d like to tag the same service operation with multiple WebGet/WebInvoke attributes, using the parameters from the best match for the behavior that actually gets applied. That would sure simplify things:

  [ServiceContract]
  public interface IBlogService
  {
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml, XsltResource = "blogtag.xslt", UriTemplate = "tags/{tag}")]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "tags/{tag}.json")]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml, UriTemplate = "tags/{tag}.xml")]
    BlogEntry[] GetTaggedBlogEntries(string tag);
  }

And one more! How about using type converters to allow me to tag a service operation and specify an RSS response format, but automate the conversion from BlogEntry[] (for example) to the appropriate syndication feed.  I haven’t done much at all with this, however, so I’m risking a comment of “um, you can do that already” or “um, that makes no sense”.

What do you think – are these requests value-added?

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