Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog

This article covers some of the advanced topics that I left out of the earlier piece on configuring HTTP for Windows Vista . In addition to having gone over the basics article, it would also be helpful to have at least a little background knowledge about...

I drew this picture for myself while working on the guidelines for implementing GetProperty . I figured that other people might find it useful as well. One of the guidelines is that queryable properties on design time objects should flow to the corresponding...

Datagrams are a self-contained unit of data. Each datagram carries with it the routing and context information needed to receive the data without knowing about any earlier exchanges of information. This means that you can continue sending datagrams from...

This post is just some quick thinking about guidelines for implementing the GetProperty method. These guidelines are still in development so think of this as a draft rather than real guidance at this time. Background: We provide an extensibility point...

Throughout much of WCF development, we tried to preserve some fundamental symmetries between the client and server sides of messaging. A few months ago in the earlier release candidates, we ended up having to break one symmetry between channel factories...

Yesterday's post was the two hundredth post, an event which I almost decided not to mention. After all, at the current pace, a hundredth post is going to come around almost three times a year. Most of them are not going to be as exciting as the first...

I haven't had a lot of problems with people commenting, although I occasionally get more inquiries than I can individually respond to in a timely manner. That's why I haven't had to make any kind of real comment policy, although I did put up a disclaimer...

I'm hosting a WCF application in IIS that uses transport security. How do I configure the security settings for my Virtual Directory (VDir)? The general model that we try to promote in WCF is that if a setting is shared between multiple places, the...

My web service needs to periodically broadcast messages to clients. The service is an Internet-facing application hosted inside of IIS. What's the best way to do this? The big limitation in this scenario is that your clients might be behind a firewall...

How do I configure my service to listen on all of the host names for my machine? How do I configure my service to only listen on one particular host name? I sometimes see these funny + and * characters in URLs when using WCF. What do these characters...

I have two web services and I'm seeing a deadlock when making calls between them. The operation calls are marked as OneWay. How do I fix this? And, how is it even possible for one-way calls to block? Marking an operation with the OneWay attribute doesn...

After switching from message security to transport security, I'm seeing a bunch of weird protocols being used in message exchanges (even when the credentials are still at the message level). What's going on? Also, why do I need to provide a certificate...

One of the major changes in Windows Vista security is that most people are no longer going to be running with Administrator privileges by default like they were doing on earlier platforms. This impacts your ability to run HTTP web services because listening...

I have a long-running service operation that needs to receive a response. What options do I have for designing my web services? The problem that most people run into with long-running operations is that the operation eventually hits some quota value...

I have a service that uses Windows authentication and want to impersonate the caller in one of the service operations. How should I configure the client and service? There are a couple of things you need to do here to make this work. On the client...

What time zone does this server use? I'm not sure if there's a precise name for this server's time zone, but it seems to be a proprietary combination of Eastern, Pacific, GMT, UTC, and Martian Standard Time. Sometimes, more than one of these time...

I'm trying to use a Certificate credential with security mode TransportWithMessageCredential. Certificate credentials were working with transport security but now my clients can't connect. Why isn't this working? This one is fairly quick to diagnose...

I'm trying to send a correlated exchange of messages using the MessageId to perform the correlation. The MessageId appears on the first message but it looks like I have to copy it around manually because it's not on the reply messages. Why isn't this...

This article series summarizes the answers to WCF questions I've seen in the last few months. There are ten questions for ten days on a variety of topics. I've changed the actual questions to remove any identifying information or distractions. Some...

Fault messages have their own quota sizes, allowing you to limit the amount of data you'll process in response to an error. Existing transport protocols don't know about SOAP fault messages, but some of them have their own error reporting mechanisms that...

I've managed by now to work out most of the difficulties of moving to the new server software. There have been some changes that primarily affect people reading these posts through their web browser (that's about 33% of you last month). It looks like...

Today is the last part of the stream upgrade sample. We've already looked at all the parts required to make the stream upgrade operate: stream, binding element, provider, initiator, and acceptor. All that's left today is to build a test harness for the...

The final pieces needed for the ROT 128 sample are a stream upgrade initiator and a stream upgrade acceptor. The initiator starts the upgrade process by providing an upgrade type string from GetNextUpgrade. I've coded this so that the initiator and acceptor...

The second attempt to upgrade to the new version of Community Server will take place early Monday morning. This knocks out the time window for the normal Monday morning post. The stream upgrade sample will continue on Tuesday covering the stream upgrade...