Software Engineering, Project Management, and Effectiveness
Here's a quick step through of using WCF in Visual Studio 2005. In this case I used a local machine, running Windows 2003, for the service and the client.
There's lot of possible paths, and this is just one path through. I focused on "Hello World" to run through the basic mechanics, but chose a path to touch enough things that might be interesting to explore another day.
ScenarioUse Visual Studio 2005 to do a dry run of creating a WCF service hosted in IIS and calling it from a console application on your local development workstation. (Note that you don't need to host WCF in IIS; for example, you could use a surrogate console application.)
PreparationIn my case, I needed the .NET 3.0 components and the WCF extensions for Visual Studio:1. .NET 3.0 Runtime Components2. WCF and WPF extensions for Visual studio
Summary of Steps
Step 1. Create the test serviceIn this step, we'll create a WCF service that uses HTTP bindings, for backward compatibility (non-.NET 3.0 clients)
Step 2. Add a Hello World MethodIn Service.cs, you'll add your Hello World method:
Compile and debug any errors.Step 3. Test your WCF service
There's two issues you might hit here:
Step 4. Enable meta-data for your WCF Service.
Step 5. Create the test client.In this step, we'll create a quick console app to call the WCF service:
Step 6. Add a Web Services reference to your WCF Service.In this step, we'll add a Web Services reference.
Step 7. Add the namespace to your
Step 8. Call your WCF serviceIn your test client, call your WCF service: static void Main(string[] args) { MyService service = new MyService(); string foo; foo = service.HelloWorld(); Console.WriteLine(foo); }When you compile and run your console application, you should see the following:Hello WorldPress any key to continue . . .
Additional Resources
Hopefully this step through helps you quickly see some of the bits and pieces you can play with.
JD Meier walks through the creation of simple WCF services to be hosted in IIS 6.0. Summary of Steps
An example of a simple WCF service WITHOUT IIS would be helpful. It would need to be self hosted someway.
Superb .. simply superb .. set of instructions. Even a absolute newbie can configure this and get this application working. We would really appreciated If you could throw some more light on the concepts of what happens at each step. I am sure it would allow us to cement the understanding of the entire project.
I think I have some more work to do. In the future, I'll look to having some examples hosting outside of IIS and what happens at each step.
This is a digest of WCF Security resources I was collecting for some time. Drop me a comment in case
This is a digest of WCF Security resources I was collecting for some time. Drop me a comment in case it is useful.