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Contents tagged with Web Services

  • Why ASMX web services are not an excuse anymore with WCF 4.0

    ASXM web services has been the favorite choice for many developers for building soap web services in .NET during a long time because of its simplicity. With ASMX web services, you get a web service up and running in a matter of seconds, as it does not require any configuration. The only thing you need to do is to build the service implementation and the message contracts (xml serialization classes), and that’s all. However, when you build a system as a black box with most of the configuration hardcoded, and only a few extensibility points in mind, you will probably end up with something that is very easy to deploy and get running, but it can not be customized at all. That’s what an ASMX web service is after all, you don’t have a way easily change the protocol versions, encoders, security or even extend with custom functionality (SOAP extensions are the only entry point for extensibility, which work as message inspectors in WCF).

  • Open Source alternatives in .NET for building RESTful services

    Usually all my posts about REST are about WCF or mention this technology in some parts. Today, I decided to take a different approach and discuss some of the projects available today for building REST services,  Resourceful and Dream framework (Both available for mono as well).
    It is worth mentioning however that the WCF team has made an excellent work introducing the new Web Model in .NET 3.5, it has definitively helped a lot to adopt this kind of service in the .NET platform. In my opinion, there are still some aspects in WCF that could be improved,

  • Conditional Puts in REST

    Conditional puts is a technique generally used in a REST architecture to inform clients about possible conflicts when multiple updates are performed simultaneously over the same resource version. It basically works as fist-write / first-win approach, a client can only commit an operation only if the underline resource has not changed in the meanwhile, otherwise it may receive a http conflict error.

  • WCF - Issue with Secure Conversation in Web farms

    While I was working for one of my customers, we ran into a very strange problem when they tried to deploy some WCF services in a web farm using cookie sessions (In order to enable secure conversation in this kind of scenario, cookies must be used to track the state of the Secure Conversation Tokens).

  • Streaming large content with WCF and deferred execution

    I will use this post to discuss an scenario that you may run into while working with WCF, a service that returns a lot of objects (Or large data) to the client applications. This scenario is not about transferring files, that is a completely different story, and I already discussed it some time ago in another post.

  • Federation Over TCP With WCF

    One of the discussions that we had during the last summit with the rest of "Connected Systems" MVPs was the possibility of supporting a Federation Scenario over TCP in WCF. For many of us that scenario was possible in theory, but unfortunately no documentation or samples existed to support it. In fact, WCF only comes with pre-built binding for federation scenarios, the "WsFederationHttpBinding" binding, which is completely tied to Http.