Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog

The code yesterday was meant to motivate a side-discussion on how faults get generated and handled between the server and client proxy. If you tried running that sample, then you would have seen that despite the FaultException being thrown on the service...

What does this code print? It seems like both choices are quite reasonable. I'll have some discussion about this tomorrow. [ServiceContract] interface IService { [OperationContract(Action= "foo" )] Message Verb(Message input); } class Service : IService...

In the channel development series last week, we looked at the characteristics of channels (protocol channels, transport channels, and why you would write a channel at all). Let's use a specific example to illustrate those points. Although the protocol...

I have a service contract with a few operations that take large inputs and do a lot of processing. If I configure the service quotas with small values to prevent too many of the expensive operations from happening at once, then the overall throughput...

Let's shift gears for a bit and talk about transport channels now as opposed to protocol channels. Everything that was said yesterday for channel stacks is still true when we add transport channels to the picture. Everything that was said yesterday for...

There are only two kinds of channels in the world. Today we'll talk about protocol channels. Tomorrow we'll talk about transport channels. Transport channels move data to and from the network Protocol channels move data between the application and...

Today's article is about the tension between two simple points. Writing channels can generally be used to solve just about any problem in WCF Writing channels is generally the most time-consuming way to solve a problem in WCF The key inference...

This is the start of a long series on channel development. Some of the material in the series is going to duplicate topics that I've written about in the past. That's ok. The goal of the series is to have a walkthrough that is self-contained and in...

I haven't forgotten about the goal to put together a table of contents for all of these articles. The part I find hardest about this process is taking the articles that talk about five or six topics and figuring out a single place where they should go...

How do I store some state about the current request so that I can use it later during the same service operation? There are several different standard contexts in which state can be stored. Each of them works the same so I'll present all of them...

How do I find out about jobs working on WCF? That's an excellent question. I went to the Microsoft career site and I had a hell of a time finding the jobs that I knew we had available. I ended up finding them by reverse engineering the positions...

We saw the poison message handling strategies for MSMQ 3 and MSMQ 4 yesterday, but how many different strategies can we come up with? Let us count the ways. I've roughly ordered these by increasing complexity. Discard. We could simply throw away...

Last time we looked at the idea of poison messages in queues - messages that are permanently unprocessable. If we don't handle a poison message carefully, then we will be locked into a permanent cycle of requesting the message from the queue, failing...

I've got a few posts on queued and durable messaging coming up over the next few weeks, and we're going to need some vocabulary for those posts that hasn't been used yet while talking about web services. Today's article covers general background around...

Clemens and Shy pointed me at this article by Harry Pierson the other day. Since I was getting ready to present at a conference, I just now had time to read the article, and it is really good. If you have been confused in the past about the relationship...

How do I construct callbacks to work over a load balancer without affinity? Let's construct a scenario to demonstrate this question. I have three machines; call them X, Y, and Z. X and Y are together behind a network load balancer. This is a server...

How do I control whether the transport signs and encrypts messages? This answer ties into the article I wrote a few weeks ago on describing channel security capabilities . If you don't remember about protection levels and security capabilities...

What should I set the action parameter to when creating a FaultException? There is indeed a pair of overloads for creating fault exceptions that take an action parameter, although most of the overloads lack this. public FaultException(TDetail...

What's the fastest binding for securely communicating over an intranet? How about if the client and server don't share a domain? A lot of attention gets paid to Internet configurations, where HTTP rules the world. HTTP is so dominant in that environment...

I'm working on an application that processes many large messages at the same time. The messages should all fit into memory, but I'm running out of memory much sooner than expected. How do I reduce the overhead associated with each message? I'm...