Creating WCF Services Experience

I have started with my study of Windows Communication Foundation. As you can read in my previous post I have decided to learn it myself. There are possibilities of learning it form recommended training and consulting companies like IDesign, Developmentor, Wintellect, newtellingence, thinktecture or Pluralsight. I kicked off with a book called learning WCF written by Michele Leroux Bustamante, who also has a blog called thatindigo girl. WCF makes it possible to build secure, reliable, and transacted systems through a simplified programming model that unifies and extends many of the previous .NET technologies including ASMX, WSE, .NET Remoting, .NET Enterprise Services, and System.Messaging. And this just what I want to learn one technology that can do all stuff that ASMX, WSE, etcetera does. It has focus on service orientation and supports for standardized Web Services specifications.

Ok I first lab I did was creating a service contract with a simple operation and implemented it on a service type. Next I had to create a host application and finally a client application.

So let’s recap here what I have done:

These 3 steps and one creates a WCF service and it can be run (called). The lab I did was from the book ‘Learning WCF’ from O’Reilly written by Michele Leroux Bustamante. She also has a site where you can download code used in labs. When I tested my client that calls the service I ran into an error: TCP error code 10061: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. From this I learned that I had to start the host project first, followed by client project. Now it worked. On web there are also a nice article on code project that let you explore Windows Communication Foundation. I tried this out and it worked. Approach was a bit different, because here a configuration file was used for the host. In this case one use svcutil to create proxy code and configuration items. I did run into another problem, when using svcutil. Their solution though I found here at this blog post. By running sn -Vr svcutil inside C:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsV6.0ABin folder it will work (thanks to Nishith Pathak).

Technorati: WCF Windows Communication Foundation Michele Leroux Bustamante VS 2008 Beta

Author: Steef-Jan Wiggers

Steef-Jan Wiggers is all in on Microsoft Azure, Integration, and Data Science. He has over 15 years’ experience in a wide variety of scenarios such as custom .NET solution development, overseeing large enterprise integrations, building web services, managing projects, designing web services, experimenting with data, SQL Server database administration, and consulting. Steef-Jan loves challenges in the Microsoft playing field combining it with his domain knowledge in energy, utility, banking, insurance, healthcare, agriculture, (local) government, bio-sciences, retail, travel, and logistics. He is very active in the community as a blogger, TechNet Wiki author, book author, and global public speaker. For these efforts, Microsoft has recognized him a Microsoft MVP for the past 8 years. View all posts by Steef-Jan Wiggers