re: Writing custom requests to simple WCF services

burhaan — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:06:00 GMT

Great post carlos, Just a little thing that i needed to ask.

I have gotten myself into a situation that requires me to use a socket based client to communicate with a WCF service that is hosted on net.tcp protocol.

How can I manage to make this communication possible?

I have tried to use TcpClient to send a simple text as request but I got the exception: "The existing connection was forcibly closed by remote host".

Then i tried to use a WCF only client and it succeeded (as expected). So, I got into IDispatchMessageInspector and managed to trace the message that the WCF client sent.

After getting the message, I sent the exact same message via socket and the dreadful exception came back to haunt me.

Can you suggest some solution for this case? Any hint, any existing article?

Thanks again for the great post.

re: Writing custom requests to simple WCF services

carlosfigueira — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:26:19 GMT

One thing you can try is to use first a HttpWebRequest (a little lower level than WCF client, a little higher than sockets) to get that working, then move down the level as that goes well. The example above, using a custom HTTP request, is shown below (I just tried building and running it, it worked :)

using System;

using System.IO;

using System.Net;

using System.Runtime.Serialization;

using System.ServiceModel;

using System.ServiceModel.Channels;

using System.Text;

[DataContract(Namespace="http://my.data.contract.namespace")]

public class MyDC

{

[DataMember]

public string str = "The string";

}

[ServiceContract]

public interface ITest

{

[OperationContract]

string EchoString(string text);

[OperationContract]

int Add(int x, int y);

[OperationContract]

MyDC EchoDC(MyDC input);

}

public class Service : ITest

{

public string EchoString(string text)

{

return text;

}

public int Add(int x, int y)

{

return x + y;

}

public MyDC EchoDC(MyDC input)

{

return input;

}

public class A

{

static Binding GetBinding()

{

BasicHttpBinding result = new BasicHttpBinding();

return result;

}

public static void Main()

{

string baseAddress = "http://" + Environment.MachineName + ":8000/Service";

ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(typeof(Service), new Uri(baseAddress));

host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(ITest), GetBinding(), "");

host.Open();

Console.WriteLine("Host opened");

HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(baseAddress);

req.Method = "POST";

req.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";

req.Headers["SOAPAction"] = "http://tempuri.org/ITest/EchoDC";

string reqBody = @"<s:Envelope xmlns:s=""http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"">

<s:Body>

<a:str>The string</a:str>

</input>

</EchoDC>

</s:Body>

</s:Envelope>";

byte[] reqBodyBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(reqBody);

req.GetRequestStream().Write(reqBodyBytes, 0, reqBodyBytes.Length);

req.GetRequestStream().Close();

HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();

Console.WriteLine("HTTP/{0} {1} {2}", resp.ProtocolVersion, (int)resp.StatusCode, resp.StatusDescription);

if (resp.ContentLength > 0)

{

Console.WriteLine(new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd());

}

resp.Close();

Console.Write("Press ENTER to close the host");

Console.ReadLine();

host.Close();

}