Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog

Inside the Standard Bindings: NetNamedPipe

Index for bindings in this series:

• BasicHttp
• WSHttp
• WSDualHttp
• WSFederationHttp
  
• NetTcp
• NetPeerTcp
  
• NetNamedPipe
• NetMsmq
  

Part 3 of the series detailing the standard bindings (Part 1 was on BasicHttp and Part 2 was on NetTcp). The standard binding for named pipes is very similar to the standard binding for TCP. Named pipes are simpler because the WCF implementation is only meant for on-machine use and consequently there are fewer exposed features. The most notable difference is that the Security.Mode setting only offers the None and Transport options. SOAP security support is not an included option.

Standard disclaimer:

I've cut down on the number of properties presented by eliminating duplicates between the binding settings and binding element settings. For instance, the XML reader quotas can be set on either the binding or the message encoder binding element, but I'm only going to show them on the message encoder. I've also omitted most of the security credential settings because they're very messy and you hopefully won't need to change them much.

Like TCP, there's three binding elements in the channel stack when Security.Mode is set to None.

1. System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransactionFlowBindingElement

   TransactionProtocol: OleTransactions
   

2. System.ServiceModel.Channels.BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement

   AddressingVersion: Addressing10 (http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing)
   MaxReadPoolSize: 64
   MaxSessionSize: 2048
   MaxWritePoolSize: 16
   ReaderQuotas: 
     MaxArrayLength: 16384
     MaxBytesPerRead: 4096
     MaxDepth: 32
     MaxNameTableCharCount: 16384
     MaxStringContentLength: 8192
   

3. System.ServiceModel.Channels.NamedPipeTransportBindingElement

   ConnectionBufferSize: 8192
   ConnectionPoolGroupName: default
   HostNameComparisonMode: StrongWildcard
   IdleTimeout: 00:02:00
   ManualAddressing: False
   MaxBufferPoolSize: 524288
   MaxBufferSize: 65536
   MaxInboundConnections: 10
   MaxOutboundConnectionsPerEndpoint: 10
   MaxOutputDelay: 00:00:00.2000000
   MaxPendingAccepts: 1
   MaxReceivedMessageSize: 65536
   Scheme: net.pipe
   TransferMode: Buffered
   

Along with the usual collection of settings that are only available through the binding itself.

CloseTimeout: 00:01:00
EnvelopeVersion: Soap12 (http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope)
MaxConnections: 10
Namespace: http://tempuri.org/
OpenTimeout: 00:01:00
ReceiveTimeout: 00:01:00
SendTimeout: 00:01:00
TransactionFlow: False

Switching the security mode setting to Transport does the same transformation for named pipes as it did for TCP. A new binding element is inserted to supply transport security, with no changes to either the binding element for the transport or the scheme of the binding.

1. System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransactionFlowBindingElement
2. System.ServiceModel.Channels.BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement
3. System.ServiceModel.Channels.WindowsStreamSecurityBindingElement

   ProtectionLevel: EncryptAndSign
   

4. System.ServiceModel.Channels.NamedPipeTransportBindingElement

Next time: Understanding the Syntax for URLs