A common requirement for web applications is to expose partial results from a larger set of data. Maybe you want your users to be able to browse through a collection of movies that they can stream. But you don't want to display all of the thousands of...

It's important to test any service you write to make sure that it's behaving the way you expect it to. In this blog post, I'll go through the main ways of testing a Web API service, exploring the benefits and drawbacks of each option so that you can test...

WebSocket is a recent technology that provides two-way communication over a TCP connection. This allows us to create real-time web apps where servers can push data to clients. In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate how this can be done by building a simple...

WebAPI is a brand new framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services. As such, it provides several features that make it easy to send back useful and informative error messages in a variety of cases. In this post, I’ll go over some of these capabilities...

Don’t you wish you could write a web service this easily: LiteWebServer server = new LiteWebServer ( "http://localhost" ); server.Get( "/Hello" , (r) => new HttpResponseMessage () { Content = new StringContent ( "Hello World!" ) ...

In .NET 3.5 SP1, DataContractSerializer was enhanced to support POCO types that weren’t marked with any serialization attributes at all. You can find my previous post about serializing POCO types here . But in some cases, you may want to customize...

One pain point with configuration that WCF developers have run into in previous versions of the framework is the limitation that WCF clients can only use the hosting executable’s configuration file. This can be problematic for clients that...

Here’s a common dilemma .NET developers encounter when working with XML: I have some XML that I want to represent in a strongly typed way, but I don’t have any XSDs to represent that XML. How do I turn that XML into CLR types that I can serialize...

In a previous post, I outlined how you could import and export the XML schema for a type that you’re serializing with DataContractSerializer. Here’s how to do the same thing if you’re serializing objects with XmlSerializer: static void RoundTripXmlMetadata...

If you try exporting the following type into an XML schema: public class Employee { public DateTime BirthDate { get ; set ; } } And you happen to be using XmlSerializer, you may be surprised to find that the schema gets exposed like...

One of the most common issues people run into with WCF configuration, and .NET applications in general, is that configuration files appear to be fixed. You only have one configuration file for an executable, and you can’t use different configuration files...

One of the brand new configuration features you can find in the Beta 2 release of .NET 4.0 is the ability to merge behaviors in the configuration hierarchy. This should make it easier to manage behaviors when you want a set of common behaviors to be used...

WCF configuration files can sometimes be very, very long. And there’s a good reason for that too: WCF makes heavy use of configuration so that you can do just about anything you can do with code in a config file. I recently decided to estimate how much...

Every once in a while, I’ll encounter a developer that thinks that WCF is too complicated to use. Whereas in fact, the basics of WCF are incredibly simple. MSDN’s tutorial hides this fact by making their introduction to WCF a fairly long and painful 6...

Ok, so a bit late, but the Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010 was released two weeks ago. With Beta 2 come a number of changes to the DataContractResolver, so I’ve finally found the time to update my previous post . For those that have read the post...

Everyone’s entitled to their own personal favorite svcutil switch, but mine is the “/reference” switch, or “/r” for short. It allows you to avoid generating a type again if it’s already present in a referenced assembly. Here’s how it works: Let...

When version 3.0 of the .NET framework shipped, DataContractSerializer could only support a few categories of CLR types. Sowmy has a good list of these that you can find here . The recommended model was to use DataContractAttributes on classes and structs...

For performance reasons, DataContractSerializer can’t always figure out what namespaces will be used in a serialized instance ahead of time. And so, you may sometimes end up having a certain XML namespace defined over and over again when it only has to...

The .NET framework comes with a variety of different serializers. Hopefully, my overview of these serializers will have provided some insight into the differences between them and the various advantages and disadvantages of using different serializers...

This is my second post about Beta 1 features in WCF 4.0 after introducing the DataContractResolver . Beta 1 introduces a new way of using WCF configuration. It’s now possible to specify a default for bindings, service behaviors, endpoint behaviors...

One of the most common requests I get about serialization is to explain how to get collections to serialize out one way or another to XML. Specifically, developers are interested in being able to manipulate the hierarchy level of the collection within...

This post has been updated to account for the changes to the DataContractResolver in the Beta 2 release of .NET 4.0. This will be my first of several posts about new features that are showing up in the Beta 1 release of .NET 4.0. Beta 1 was released...

One of the more common questions I get is along these lines: I want to configure svcutil to use a particular binding. How do I do that? Usually, this happens for one of two reasons: 1) You’ve exposed your metadata with a secure binding...

For many WCF developers, service metadata import and export is a magical thing. You start your service with a serviceMetadataBehavior, set httpGetEnabled to true or add an IMetadataExchange endpoint, and metadata gets automatically generated for you....

In my last post , I claimed that one of the reasons you should try to avoid known types is that it significantly degrades performance. But you should never take anyone’s word about performance, so here’s an actual test comparing the performance of using...