It's 2008. Where's my flying car? RSS 2.0
 Sunday, April 24, 2005

I just looked at my blog and found that I haven’t written anything in more than three weeks and not anything of any substance in more than 6 weeks. I can’t even believe it’s been that long. Time flies by when you’re busy. I still owe a follow up to this here, and will try to get that done in the next two weeks or so.

So what happened in the past 6 weeks? I learned how to stand and “surf” for several seconds at a time on a snowboard in Vail (Colorado) and bruised every part of my body the next week when my friends put me up on a real mountain in Keystone. I had the honor of sitting on the review board of the Microsoft Certified Architect program in Redmond, attended the Indigo Software Design Review in Seattle, spoke at the Visual Studio User Groups in Denver and Boulder (Tim Huckaby gave me 15 minutes of his time at the latter), and had several customer meetings in the US and Germany. I recorded 8 hours worth of webcasts on Service Orientation and spoke at workshops on the same topics in Belgium and Germany.  I spoke at the Microsoft Gulf Developer Conference GDC2005 in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), at the Microsoft North Africa Developer Conference NDC2005 in Algiers (Algeria), and between all these things I ported an application to Indigo and prepared my talks for several conferences that are happening this next week and later this year and for which the content deadlines were due.

Now, if that sounds busy, consider next week: Today I fly to Istanbul at 17:30h, get there at 21:30h. I will do 3 talks at a large MS conference in Istanbul the next day. Tuesday morning (really: middle of the night) I have to get out to the airport and catch a 5:40am flight to Ljubljana in Slovenia. From there I will be picked up and driven to Opatija in Croatia where I’ll do a track keynote and another talk at the WinDays conference in the afternoon. After dinner, I go back to Ljubljana aiport and fly (at 11:45pm) back to Istanbul, getting there at 2:50am. 3 more talks in Turkey on Wednesday. Then, Thursday morning, I catch the same flight to Ljubljana at 5:40am, but will connect through to Vienna in Austria where I will arrive at around 8:30am and will hurry to the Microsoft office to do two full days of Visual Studio 2005 training for the MS Ascend program and then fly home to Düsseldorf Friday evening. By Saturday I will likely need medical attention.

The upcoming week is so crazy that I will try to document it here. Let’s see whether I can pull it off.

Sunday, April 24, 2005 1:12:40 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [6] - Trackback
Talks
 Friday, April 01, 2005

You can make a difference on this day in April. Go and sign this petition. Help save IDL.

What I personally would love to see are two new switched alongside midl.exe /mktyplib203:  

/wsdl – Verifies that all attributes used are applicable to a wsdl contract and then generates a *.wsdl file from IDL

/serviceModel – Verifies that all attributes are System.ServiceModel compatible and then generates a *.cpp file (managed code!) definition Indigo [ServiceContract] and [OperationContract].

Friday, April 01, 2005 7:54:13 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [2] - Trackback

 Wednesday, March 16, 2005

The Indigo bits are out at MSDN Subscriber downloads. Go get them and start playing.

  Tools, SDKs and DDKs,
      Platform Tools, SDKs, DDKs
          WinFX SDK – Community Technology Preview
              Avalon and Indigo Community Technology Preview - March 05 (English)

Wednesday, March 16, 2005 6:22:59 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [2] - Trackback
Indigo
 Tuesday, March 01, 2005

I’ll write a few more parts of my little Indigo series next weekend (too busy during the week), and will move from “throw arbitrary XML on the wire” to typed messages. However, before I’ll do so, I am curious about your opinion and I am asking you to comment (on the blog-site) on which of the following two declarations you would prefer.

I should probably quickly explain a few things before I let you look at the code snippets: [DataContract] attribute essentially replaces [Serializable] for Indigo and is used to label classes than can be serialized by the System.Runtime.Serialization infrastructure into XML or into a binary representation. So the serialization control through attributes is unified and independent of the actual output flavor you choose at runtime. The [DataMember] attribute labels fields or properties that are part of the data contract and should be (de)serialized. Unlike the current serialization models of Remoting (System.Runtime.Remoting.Formatters) and the XML Serializer (System.Xml.Serialization) where the serializers grab anything public, this model is strictly opt-in, meaning that public fields and properties do not get serialized unless you explicitly label them with [DataMember]. Even more surprising, the new serialization infrastructure does work with fields that are private.

I have a clear preference for one of these two declarations and have also what I think to be a solid explanation for why I prefer it, but before I elaborate, I am interested in your opinion.

Version A

[DataContract]
public partial class Address
{
    [DataMember("Company")]
    private string company;
    [DataMember("RecipientName")]
    private string recipientName;
    [DataMember("AddressLine1")]
    private string addressLine1;

    ... more fields ...

    public string Company
    {
        get { return company; }
        set { company = value; }
    }
   
    public string RecipientName
    {
        get { return recipientName; }
        set { recipientName = value; }
    }
   
    public string AddressLine1
    {
        get { return addressLine1; }
        set { addressLine1 = value; }
    }

    ... more properties and methods and stuff ...
}

 Version B

[DataContract]
public partial class Address
{
    private string company;
    private string recipientName;
    private string addressLine1;

    ... more fields ...

    [DataMember("Company")]
    public string Company
    {
        get { return company; }
        set { company = value; }
    }

    [DataMember("RecipientName")]
    public string RecipientName
    {
        get { return recipientName; }
        set { recipientName = value; }
    }
    [DataMember("AddressLine1")]
    public string AddressLine1
    {
        get { return addressLine1; }
        set { addressLine1 = value; }
    }

    ... more properties and methods and stuff ...
}

Consider this obvious statement: The class is declared in this way to provide programmatic access to and encapsulation of data that will eventually be serialized into some wire format or deserialized from a wire format.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005 6:27:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [16] - Trackback
Indigo
 Sunday, February 27, 2005

Christian Weyer is staying at my place for the next three nights, because we’re both presenting at a Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 training at Microsoft’s Neuss office, which is more or less down the street (highway) from where I live. Christian brought some good beer from his region (Franken – Bavaria’s northern part) and we’re having some of that, watch some TV (“We Were Soldiers” and “Broken Arrow”, we’re just guys like the next one), and otherwise get some email done, and chat. We just agreed on our programming hero. The prize goes to: Lutz Roeder. We’d be nothing without Reflector.

Sunday, February 27, 2005 2:00:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [9] - Trackback
Other Stuff
 Saturday, February 26, 2005

[Read Part 1 and Part 2 first]

Like with parts 1 and 2, I’ll stick with the “this isn’t RPC” theme for this 3rd part of this little series and will show how to flow free form XML from and to services. However, I will drop the “client”/”server” nomenclature from here on and will talk about endpoints. If you look at the contract below (along with the following explanation, of course), you’ll quickly figure out why – both parties in the “buyer”/”seller” conversation I am declaring in the contract below, act as client and as server at the same time.

In contrast to the previous two examples, I am not using the raw Message class, but I move one notch up on the messaging stack and use the XmlSerializer formatting mode for Indigo, which allows me to flow the contents of an XmlNode between services just like it can be done today with ASP.NET Web Services. In addition, I show how custom message headers can be declared and flowed with (really: inside) messages. But first things first:

The snippet below declares one contract (!) with two endpoint service contracts. One endpoint defines the “seller” side and the other defines the “buyer” side of a duplex conversation that two service implementations will have about a (simplified) purchasing process. It also defines an application-specific (SOAP-) header that is used to flow the purchasing process identifier between the parties. That identifier can be used to locate the process state from disk or from some in-memory location at either side as the conversation progresses.

The seller-side service contract is defined through the ISeller interface that is appropriately labeled with a [ServiceContract] attribute and the buyer-side likewise defined through the IBuyer interface. The fusion of these two interfaces into what is effectively a single contract is established by mutually linking both interfaces by setting the respective CallbackContract property of the [ServiceContract] attribute to the respective other interface type. I highlighted the two places where that’s being done.

When I say “one contract”, that is not really true on the WSDL level. In WSDL, both interfaces would indeed be represented as independent contracts. (Which goes to show that WSDL isn’t really “the contract”, but represents just a subset of the complete metadata model).

Each operation in these contracts is labeled with an [OperationContract] attribute that defines the message flow as IsOneWay=true. That’s so because in a duplex conversation, messages flow always unidirectionally and the receiver answers not by “returning a result”, but rather by sending a message (or multiple messages) to the other party’s endpoint. All operation contracts also define the operation style to be DocumentBare, which means that the infrastructure will not auto-generate body wrapper elements.

Instead, each operation defines its own body wrapper by flagging the XmlNode typed argument for the message content with a [MessageBody] attribute and assigning an appropriate name to it.  Above the XmlNode content argument, you can see how the custom header PurchaseProcessHeader is specified for each operation. Custom headers are flagged with the [MessageHeader] attribute and therefore flow in the soap:Header section of the message.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace DuplexMessagingConversation
{
    [XmlRoot(Namespace = PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
    [XmlType(Namespace = PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
    public class PurchaseProcessHeader
    {
        public const string NamespaceURI="urn:newtelligence-com:indigosamples:purchasing";
        public const string ElementName="PurchaseOrder";

        private string orderIdentifier;
       
        public string OrderIdentifier
        {
            get { return orderIdentifier; }
            set { orderIdentifier = value; }
        }
    }

    [ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:newtelligence-com:indigosamples:seller",
                     Session = false,
                     CallbackContract = typeof(IBuyer),
                     FormatMode = ContractFormatMode.XmlSerializer)]
    interface ISeller
    {
        [OperationContract(IsOneWay=true,IsInitiating=true,
                           Style=ServiceOperationStyle.DocumentBare)]
        void HandlePurchaseOrder(
            [MessageHeader(Name=PurchaseProcessHeader.ElementName,
                           Namespace=PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
            PurchaseProcessHeader process,
            [MessageBody(Name="PurchaseOrderMessage")]
            XmlNode purchaseOrder);

        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, IsInitiating = false,
                           Style = ServiceOperationStyle.DocumentBare)]
        void HandlePaymentNotification(
            [MessageHeader(Name = PurchaseProcessHeader.ElementName,
                           Namespace = PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
               PurchaseProcessHeader process,
            [MessageBody(Name = "PaymentNotificationMessage")]
               XmlNode paymentNotification);

        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, IsInitiating = false, IsTerminating = true,
                           Style = ServiceOperationStyle.DocumentBare)]
        void HandleShippingConfirmation(
            [MessageHeader(Name = PurchaseProcessHeader.ElementName,
                           Namespace = PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
            PurchaseProcessHeader process,
            [MessageBody(Name = "ShippingConfirmationMessage")]
            XmlNode shippingConfirmation);
    }

    [ServiceContract(Namespace="urn:newtelligence-com:indigosamples:buyer",
                     Session = false,
                     CallbackContract = typeof(ISeller),
                     FormatMode=ContractFormatMode.XmlSerializer)]
    interface IBuyer
    {
        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, IsInitiating = true,
                           Style = ServiceOperationStyle.DocumentBare)]
        void HandlePurchaseOrderConfirmation(
            [MessageHeader(Name = PurchaseProcessHeader.ElementName,
                           Namespace = PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
            PurchaseProcessHeader process,
            [MessageBody(Name = "PurchaseOrderConfirmationMessage")]
            XmlNode purchaseOrderConfirmation);

        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, IsInitiating = false,
                           Style = ServiceOperationStyle.DocumentBare)]
        void HandleInvoice(
            [MessageHeader(Name = PurchaseProcessHeader.ElementName,
                           Namespace = PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
            PurchaseProcessHeader process,
            [MessageBody(Name = "InvoiceMessage")]
            XmlNode invoice);

        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, IsInitiating = false, IsTerminating = true,
                           Style = ServiceOperationStyle.DocumentBare)]
        void HandleShippingNotification(
            [MessageHeader(Name = PurchaseProcessHeader.ElementName,
                           Namespace = PurchaseProcessHeader.NamespaceURI)]
            PurchaseProcessHeader process,
            [MessageBody(Name = "ShippingNotificationMessage")]
            XmlNode shippingNotification);
    }
}

To illustrate the effect of these declarations on the wire (I will spare you the XSD/WSDL goop), I’ll show an sample message (grabbed from the debugger) as it can be seen at the ISeller endpoint’s HandlePurchaseOrder operation when it arrives.    

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"
           
xmlns:a="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing"
           
xmlns:r="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/01/rm">
    <
s:Header>
        <
a:Action s:mustUnderstand="1">
            urn:newtelligence-com:indigosamples:seller/ISeller/HandlePurchaseOrder
        </a:Action>
        <
h:PurchaseOrder xmlns="urn:newtelligence-com:indigosamples:purchasing"
                        
xmlns:h="urn:newtelligence-com:indigosamples:purchasing"
                        
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
                        
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
            <
OrderIdentifier>1234567890</OrderIdentifier>
        </
h:PurchaseOrder>

        <
r:Sequence s:mustUnderstand="1">
            <
r:Identifier>uuid:b99041bf-fab8-45dd-9235-0909d9c61d04;id=2</r:Identifier>
            <
r:MessageNumber>1</r:MessageNumber>
        </
r:Sequence>
        <
a:From>
            <
a:Address>net.tcp://localhost/buyer/reply/e01289a8-424f-4e1a-bba5-b3fb7c92a023</a:Address>
        </
a:From>
        <
a:To s:mustUnderstand="1">net.tcp://localhost/seller</a:To>
    </
s:Header>
    <
s:Body>
        <
PurchaseOrderMessage xmlns="urn:newtelligence-com:indigosamples:seller">
            <
Order xmlns="">...</Order>
        </
PurchaseOrderMessage>

    </
s:Body>
</
s:Envelope>

So … having the contract declaration in place, we can build the service. With your knowledge from the previous parts of this series, the seller side is (almost) straightforward to implement. I create a SellerService supporting the defined ISeller interface and write all operations (methods) in a similar fashion. First I dump out the content of the incoming message and an artificial instance identifier I use to play with instancing.  The only “magic” is in how I obtain the callback channel that I need to be able to send my answers to the other side. To be precise, the magic isn’t mine, it’s sitting inside Indigo. The call  IBuyer buyer = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<IBuyer>() yields a ready-to-use channel that is properly configured and bound to the “other side”. Having that in hands, I cook up an answer (or two, or none, as you can see below) and send that to “the buyer”. The hosting class and the service host are standard fare.

using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;

namespace DuplexMessagingConversation
{
    [ServiceBehavior(InstanceMode = InstanceMode.PrivateSession)]
    class SellerService : ISeller
    {
        Guid instanceId = Guid.NewGuid();

        public void HandlePurchaseOrder(PurchaseProcessHeader process, XmlNode data)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Seller: Purchase Order Received\n\t{0}\n\tInstance {1}",
                              data.OuterXml, instanceId);
            IBuyer buyer = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<IBuyer>();

            XmlDocument orderConfirmation = new XmlDocument();
            orderConfirmation.LoadXml("<OrderConfirmation>...</OrderConfirmation>");
            buyer.HandlePurchaseOrderConfirmation(process, orderConfirmation);

            XmlDocument invoice = new XmlDocument();
            invoice.LoadXml("<Invoice>...</Invoice>");
            buyer.HandleInvoice(process, invoice);
        }

        public void HandlePaymentNotification(PurchaseProcessHeader process, XmlNode data)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Seller: Payment Notification Received\n\t{0}\n\tInstance {1}",
                              data.OuterXml, instanceId);
            IBuyer buyer = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<IBuyer>();

            XmlDocument shippingNotification = new XmlDocument();
            shippingNotification.LoadXml("<Shipped>...</Shipped>");
            buyer.HandleShippingNotification(process, shippingNotification);
        }

        public void HandleShippingConfirmation(PurchaseProcessHeader process, XmlNode data)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Seller: Shipping Confirmation Received\n\t{0}\n\tInstance {1}",
                              data.OuterXml, instanceId);
        }
    }

    class Seller
    {
        ServiceHost<SellerService> serviceHost;

        public void Open()
        {
            serviceHost = new ServiceHost<SellerService>();
            serviceHost.Open();
        }

        public void Close()
        {
            serviceHost.Close();
        }
    }
}

The buyer-side’s service implementation looks almost identical. The one significant difference here is that the buyer is (in the self-hosted scenario I have here: must be) a singleton within the scope of the conversation. That means that the initiator of the conversation (what we usually call “client”) will have to create a service instance and hand that down into the infrastructure. Because I want to know when the conversation is over and can shut down my test program, I hand a ManualResetEvent to the service instance and have it Set it to signaled whenever the buyer’s last expected message in the purchasing process arrives (shipping notification). Otherwise the service implementation doesn’t have any more surprises.

More interesting is the InitiatePurchase method. It predictably creates a service host instance for the buyer service and a channel factory that we need to send the first message (purchase order) to the seller. From there onwards, things are a little different than in the previous examples.

As the next step, I create a “service site”, which acts as the manager for the duplex conversation we’re setting up. The ServiceSite is initialized with the service host and a newly created service instance. As I indicated in the previous paragraph, that instance is a singleton for the conversation; it’s not a singleton per-se.

Using the service site as an argument, I can now create a duplex channel with a call to CreateDuplexChannel on the channel factory. The resulting channel is set up to do everything necessary to listen for answers in the scope of the conversation and to relay the required “send answers here” info to the other side. If you look at the SOAP message above, you’ll see how that back reference is flowing using a WS-Addressing wsa:From header, which is a reasonable thing to do as per WS-Addressing (see: 3. / [reply endpoint] paragraph).

Once I have the channel in hands, I create the custom header instance and a purchase order document (well…) and send it off to the seller side. Once that’s done, I hang out and wait until the conversation is over and subsequently shut down.

Using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.Threading;

namespace DuplexMessagingConversation
{
    class BuyerService : IBuyer
    {
        Guid instanceId = Guid.NewGuid();
        ManualResetEvent waitHandle;

        public BuyerService(ManualResetEvent waitHandle)
        {
            this.waitHandle = waitHandle;
        }

        public void HandlePurchaseOrderConfirmation(PurchaseProcessHeader process, XmlNode data)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Buyer: Purchase Order Confirmation Received\n\t{0}\n\tInstance {1}",
                               data.OuterXml, instanceId);
            return;
        }

        public void HandleInvoice(PurchaseProcessHeader process, XmlNode data)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Buyer: Invoice Received\n\t{0}\n\tInstance {1}",
                               data.OuterXml, instanceId);
            ISeller seller = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<ISeller>();

            XmlDocument paymentNotification = new XmlDocument();
            paymentNotification.LoadXml("<Payment>...</Payment>");
            seller.HandlePaymentNotification(process, paymentNotification);
        }

        public void HandleShippingNotification(PurchaseProcessHeader process, XmlNode data)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Buyer: Shipping Notification Received\n\t{0}\n\tInstance {1}",
                               data.OuterXml, instanceId);
            ISeller seller = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<ISeller>();

            XmlDocument shippingConfirmation = new XmlDocument();
            shippingConfirmation.LoadXml("<ShipmentReceived>...</ShipmentReceived>");
            seller.HandleShippingConfirmation(process, shippingConfirmation);
            waitHandle.Set();
        }
    }

    class Buyer
    {
        public void InitiatePurchase()
        {
            ServiceHost<BuyerService> buyerHost = new ServiceHost<BuyerService>();
            using (ChannelFactory<ISeller> channelFactory = new ChannelFactory<ISeller>("clientChannel"))
            {
                ManualResetEvent conversationDone = new ManualResetEvent(false);
                using (ServiceSite replyTarget = new ServiceSite(buyerHost, new BuyerService(conversationDone)))
                {
                    ISeller channel = channelFactory.CreateDuplexChannel(replyTarget);

                    PurchaseProcessHeader header = new PurchaseProcessHeader();
                    header.OrderIdentifier = "1234567890";

                    XmlDocument purchaseOrderDocument = new XmlDocument();
                    purchaseOrderDocument.LoadXml("<Order>...</Order>");
                    channel.HandlePurchaseOrder(header, purchaseOrderDocument);

                    conversationDone.WaitOne();
                    replyTarget.Close();
                }
                channelFactory.Close();
            }
            buyerHost.Close();
        }
   }
}

The Program is simple and predictable; I am just posting it for completeness and because I renamed the classes.

using System;

namespace DuplexMessagingConversation
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Seller server = new Seller();
            server.Open();

            Buyer client = new Buyer();
            client.InitiatePurchase();

            Console.WriteLine("Press ENTER to quit");
            Console.ReadLine();
            server.Close();
        }
    }
}

The configuration file that goes with this example is of course a bit different from the previous ones. The <client> section and the buyerClientBinding binding configuration apply to the buyer side, and the <services> section and the sellerBinding are for the seller side. These sections would be respectively split across two configuration files, if we would host the sample in two processes.

Of course, the buyer’s <client>/<endpoint> definition for the channel refers to the buyerClientBinding. That binding defines three required binding elements: <reliableSession> configures the channel to use a reliable messaging session with default values, <compositeDuplex/> enables duplex support and <tcpTransport/> selects the TCP transport. The order of these elements is significant and defines how these “behaviors” are stacked in the channel. Quite special is the clientBaseAddress attribute of the <compositeDuplex/> element; this value is used as the base URI to dynamically construct the endpoint on which replies shall be received by the buyer instance for this conversation. The result of that composition can be seen in the wsa:From element in the SOAP message above.

The seller-side configuration for the <service> and its <endpoint> is largely equivalent to what I’ve explained in the previous examples. The only real difference is that the sellerBinding binding now also defines the required binding elements and behaviors I just pointed out.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<
configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">
    <
system.serviceModel>
        <
bindings>
            <
customBinding>
                <
binding configurationName="sellerBinding">
                    <
reliableSession/>
                    <
compositeDuplex/>
                    <
tcpTransport/>
                </
binding>
                <
binding configurationName="buyerClientBinding">
                    <
reliableSession/>
                    <
compositeDuplex clientBaseAddress="net.tcp://localhost/buyer/reply"/>
                    <
tcpTransport/>
                </
binding>
            </
customBinding>
        </
bindings>
        <
client>
            <
endpoint address="net.tcp://localhost/seller"
                      
bindingConfiguration="buyerClientBinding"
                      bindingType="customBinding"
                     
configurationName="clientChannel"
                     
contractType="DuplexMessagingConversation.ISeller, DuplexMessagingConversation"/>
        </
client>
        <
services>
            <
service serviceType="DuplexMessagingConversation.SellerService, DuplexMessagingConversation">
                <
endpoint contractType="DuplexMessagingConversation.ISeller, DuplexMessagingConversation"
                     address="net.tcp://localhost/seller"
                     bindingType="customBinding"
                     bindingConfiguration="sellerBinding" />
            </
service>
        </
services>
    </
system.serviceModel>
</
configuration>

And, lastly, here’s the output:

Seller: Purchase Order Received

        <Order xmlns="">...</Order>

        Instance eb628fce-ac56-43af-9326-5bfc62a101dc

Buyer: Purchase Order Confirmation Received

        <OrderConfirmation xmlns="">...</OrderConfirmation>

        Instance c1ce0c0f-fb98-4432-86fb-c81ac7243295

Buyer: Invoice Received

        <Invoice xmlns="">...</Invoice>

        Instance c1ce0c0f-fb98-4432-86fb-c81ac7243295

Seller: Payment Notification Received

        <Payment xmlns="">...</Payment>

        Instance eb628fce-ac56-43af-9326-5bfc62a101dc

Buyer: Shipping Notification Received

        <Shipped xmlns="">...</Shipped>

        Instance c1ce0c0f-fb98-4432-86fb-c81ac7243295

Seller: Shipping Confirmation Received

        <ShipmentReceived xmlns="">...</ShipmentReceived>

        Instance eb628fce-ac56-43af-9326-5bfc62a101dc

Press ENTER to quit

Again, the messages are free form XML, so I am using Indigo strictly as a raw messaging platform. It’s just a bit more powerful. ;-) If I’d show you a functionally equivalent application based on System.Messaging and MSMQ, you wouldn’t be done reading, yet.  

Saturday, February 26, 2005 12:51:43 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1] - Trackback
Indigo
 Friday, February 25, 2005

[You should read Part 1 of this little series before you proceed reading this one.]

In this 2nd part I am extending the simple messaging example of Part 1 by adding some explicit WS-Addressing trickery. Addressing is so fundamental that its properties are baked right into the Headers collection of the Indigo Message. Even though there are (and I will eventually show) much easier ways to do request/reply management that hide most of what I am doing here very conveniently under the covers, I’ll give you an example of how you can send messages to a service and then instruct the service to explicitly reply back to an endpoint you provide. To make it a little more fun, I am setting up two alternate reply endpoints and have the service come back to them in turns. The Program host class is identical to the one the previous example, so I’ll show only client and service code along with the config.

The server-side code below grew a little bit as you can see. Now, there is a IGenericReplyChannel that is the contract for the replies. It looks suspiciously like the client-side’s IGenericMessageChannel and it is indeed a copy/paste clone of it. I just didn’t want to share code between client and server side. The Receive method has changed insofar as that it no longer prints the message to the console, but now creates a reply and sends the reply to the endpoint that the client indicates through the (WS-Adressing-) ReplyTo header of the incoming message.

To do this, the service constructs a ChannelFactory< IGenericReplyChannel>, using the endpoint address indicated in the incoming message’s ReplyTo header and getting the binding information from the “replyChannel” client setting in the config file shown further down. (Note that this is a bit simplistic, because it assumes that the ReplyTo EPR uses a compatible binding. There is a brilliant way to fix this, but … later). Then, the message body of the incoming message is read into an XmlDocument and if this was a real application, it would likely do something here. For now, we just leave the content as it is and punt it back out.

To construct the reply message, I don’t use the CreateReplyMessage() method provided on the Message class, simply because it doesn’t have an appropriate overload to deal with an XmlReader in the same way as Message.CreateMessage() does. I am sure that’s a minor oversight that’s just a problem with my particular Indigo build. Creating a reply is quite simple, though. All I need to do is to copy the incoming message’s MessageID value into the RelatesTo.Reply property of the outgoing message. For simplicity, I don’t check whether that header is present and set, which I really should do, because there is no actual contract or policy in place (for now). Once I have the reply constructed, just copying the incoming body into it, I send it out through a channel (“proxy”) constructed by channel factory.

using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;

namespace SimpleAddressing
{
    [ServiceContract]
    interface IGenericMessageEndpoint
    {
        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, Action = "*")]
        void Receive(Message msg);
    }

    [ServiceContract]
    interface IGenericReplyChannel
    {
        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, Action = "*")]
        void Send(Message msg);
    }

    class GenericMessageEndpoint : IGenericMessageEndpoint
    {
        public void Receive(Message msg)
        {
            using (ChannelFactory<IGenericReplyChannel> channelFactory =
                new ChannelFactory<IGenericReplyChannel>(msg.Headers.ReplyTo, "replyChannel"))
            {
                XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
                doc.Load(msg.GetBodyReader());

                // There is a msg.CreateReplyMessage(...), but that is missing the XmlReader ctor overload
                using (Message reply = Message.CreateMessage("urn:some-action-reply", new XmlNodeReader(doc)))
                {
                    reply.Headers.RelatesTo.Reply = msg.Headers.MessageID;
                    IGenericReplyChannel replyChannel = channelFactory.CreateChannel();
                    replyChannel.Send(reply);
                }
                channelFactory.Close();
            }
        }
    }

    class Server
    {
        ServiceHost<GenericMessageEndpoint> serviceHost;

        public void Open()
        {
            serviceHost = new ServiceHost<GenericMessageEndpoint>();
            serviceHost.Open();
        }

        public void Close()
        {
            serviceHost.Close();
        }
    }
}

Having a reply-enabled server-side, we can now get to the juicy part: the client. Since we now need to listen for replies, the client has to expose a reply-endpoint and therefore also act as a server. (That is the reason why “endpoint” is preferred in service-land rather than the “client”/”server” nomenclature). Therefore, I define a IGenericReplyEndpoint contract (no surprises there) and implement that in GenericReplyEndpoint. To make the example a bit more fun, the constructor of that service class takes two arguments: The client argument refers to an instance of the Client application class and epName gives the service instance (!) a name. The client reference is used to let the client application know how many messages were already received so that it can shut down, once the expected replies for all sent messages have come back. The notification about received messages is done inside the ReceiveReply method,  which otherwise just writes the message body to the console.

Unlike the previous example, this service implementation isn’t used directly. Instead, I derive two subclasses from it: ReplyEndpointA and ReplyEndpointB. These two classes each implement a constructor that passes “A” and “B”, respectively, for the epName argument to the base-class and pass-through the client argument. In case you wonder how the ServiceHost could possibly construct instances of these service classes, not knowing the appropriate parameters to pass to them: Instances of these two classes are pre-constructed and fed into the service host as singletons as you will see below.

using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.Threading;

namespace SimpleAddressing
{
    [ServiceContract]
    interface IGenericMessageChannel
    {
        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, Action = "*")]
        void Send(Message msg);
    }

    [ServiceContract]
    interface IGenericReplyEndpoint
    {
        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, Action = "*")]
        void ReceiveReply(Message msg);
    }

    class GenericReplyEndpoint : IGenericReplyEndpoint
    {
        Client client;
        string epName;

        public GenericReplyEndpoint(Client client, string epName)
        {
            epName = epName;
            client = client;
        }

        public void ReceiveReply(Message msg)
        {
            XmlDictionaryReader xdr = msg.GetBodyReader();
            Console.Write("{0}: ", epName);
            Console.WriteLine(xdr.ReadOuterXml());
            client.MessageReceived();
        }
    }

    class ReplyEndpointA : GenericReplyEndpoint
    {
        public ReplyEndpointA(Client client):base(client, "A")
        {
        }
    }

    class ReplyEndpointB : GenericReplyEndpoint
    {
        public ReplyEndpointB(Client client)
            : base(client, "B")
        {
        }
    }

    … continued below …

The Client application class is a bit more intricate than the previous version, but there is no rocket science there. I have a counter for the number of messages received and a ManualResetEvent that is getting signaled whenever the number of received messages matches (or exceeds) the number of sent messages. That happens in the MessageReceived method, which is called by the service singletons. The class also has a UniqueIDGenerator, which is an Indigo-supplied class that lets me generate values for the MessageID header that is required alongside using ReplyTo.

In the SendLoop method, I now create two service host instances that shall receive the replies to messages I send; one of type ServiceHost<ReplyEndpointA> and one of type ServiceHost<ReplyEndpointB>. Each of these hosts receives an instance of its service type as a construction argument. Doing so causes the service host to operate in singleton mode, meaning that it will not create new service instances out of and by itself, but rather use only the exact instance supplied here. In the actual send loop, I alternate (i%2==0) between those two service hosts and invoke SendMessage passing the channel factory (not the channel as in the previous example) and the chosen ServiceHost instance.

In SendMessage, I do a few simple things and only one not-so-obvious thing. A new message is constructed as the first step and loaded with an action and the body content. Then I grab the destination address from the channel factory, which sits in the channel factory’s Description.Endpoint.Address property and assign that to the message’s To header. The MessageID is set to a new unique identifier created using the messageIdGenerator. All that is pretty straightforward. Not immediately clear might be what I am doing with the ReplyTo header:

Once a service host is Open, it’s bound to set of endpoints and is actively listening on those endpoints using “endpoint listeners”. I am writing “set of endpoints”, because a service might have several. Each service can expose as many endpoints as it likes; each with a separate binding (transport/behavior/address) and each with a separate contract. There are puzzling special cases, of which you’ll see at least one in this series, where a service listens and properly responds to a contract type that is nowhere to be seen on the actual service implementation. The active endpoints sit on the EndpointListeners collection.

For simplicity (again, this is a bit naïve, but serves the purpose for the time being) and to obtain a ReplyTo address to pass to the service I am sending the message to, I reach into that collection and grab the first available endpoint listener’s address. What I should be doing here is to check whether that listener is indeed the one for the IGenericReplyEndpoint contract and whether I can find one with a binding that is mostly compatible with the one the outbound channel uses. The latter selection would be done to make sure that if I send out via “net.tcp” and I expose a “net.tcp” endpoint myself, I would preferably pass that endpoint instead of a possible “http” endpoint I might be listening on at the same time. Once ReplyTo is set, I send the message out.   

    … continuation from above …

    class Client
    {
        const int numMessages = 15;
        int messagesReceived;
        ManualResetEvent allReceived;
        UniqueIDGenerator messageIdGenerator;
        XmlDocument contentDocument;

        public Client()
        {
            messagesReceived = 0;
            allReceived = new ManualResetEvent(false);
            messageIdGenerator = new UniqueIDGenerator();
            contentDocument = new XmlDocument();
            contentDocument.LoadXml("<rose>is a</rose>");
        }

        void SendMessage(ChannelFactory<IGenericMessageChannel> channelFactory,
                         ServiceHost replyService)
        {
            XmlNodeReader content = new XmlNodeReader( contentDocument.DocumentElement);
            using (Message msg = Message.CreateMessage("urn:some-action", content))
            {
                msg.Headers.To = channelFactory.Description.Endpoint.Address;
                msg.Headers.MessageID = messageIdGenerator.Next();
                msg.Headers.ReplyTo = replyService.EndpointListeners[0].GetEndpointAddress();
                IGenericMessageChannel channel = channelFactory.CreateChannel();
                channel.Send(msg);
            }
        }

        public void SendLoop()
        {
            ServiceHost<ReplyEndpointA> replyServiceA = new ServiceHost<ReplyEndpointA>(new ReplyEndpointA(this));
            replyServiceA.Open();
            ServiceHost<ReplyEndpointB> replyServiceB = new ServiceHost<ReplyEndpointB>(new ReplyEndpointB(this));
            replyServiceB.Open();

            using (ChannelFactory<IGenericMessageChannel> channelFactory =
                        new ChannelFactory<IGenericMessageChannel>("clientChannel"))
            {
                channelFactory.Open();
               
                for (int i = 0; i < numMessages; i++)
                {
                    if (i % 2 == 0)
                    {
                        SendMessage(channelFactory, replyServiceB);
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        SendMessage(channelFactory, replyServiceA);
                    }
                }
                channelFactory.Close();
            }
            allReceived.WaitOne();
            replyServiceA.Close();
            replyServiceB.Close();
        }

        public void MessageReceived()
        {
            if (++ messagesReceived >= numMessages)
            {
                allReceived.Set();
            }
        }
    }
}

What’s left is the matching configuration for this. The mechanics of how the configuration maps to the classes and instances are largely the same as in the simple messaging example. A small difference is that the replyChannel client configuration has no target address attribute, because that one is always supplied via ReplyTo (refer to the GenericMessageEndpoint’s Receive method above to see how that is wired up). Oh, yes, and I switched it all to http transport in case you don’t notice. TCP would work just as well, but I felt like I needed a little change. The assumed assembly name for this sample is “SimpleAddressing”, of course.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<
configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">
    <
system.serviceModel>
        <
bindings>
            <
customBinding>
                <
binding configurationName="defaultBinding">
                    <
httpTransport/>
                </
binding>
            </
customBinding>
        </
bindings>
        <
client>
            <
endpoint address="http://localhost/genericep"
               
bindingConfiguration="defaultBinding"
                bindingType="customBinding"
               
configurationName="clientChannel"
               
contractType="SimpleAddressing.IGenericMessageChannel, SimpleAddressing"/>
            <
endpoint
                
bindingConfiguration="defaultBinding"
                bindingType="customBinding"
               
configurationName="replyChannel"
               
contractType="SimpleAddressing.IGenericReplyChannel, SimpleAddressing"/>
        </
client>
        <
services>
            <
service serviceType="SimpleAddressing.GenericMessageEndpoint, SimpleAddressing">
                <
endpoint contractType="SimpleAddressing.IGenericMessageEndpoint, SimpleAddressing"
                                    address="http://localhost/genericep"
                                    bindingType="customBinding"
                                    bindingConfiguration="defaultBinding" />
            </
service>
            <
service serviceType="SimpleAddressing.ReplyEndpointA, SimpleAddressing">
                <
endpoint contractType="SimpleAddressing.IGenericReplyEndpoint, SimpleAddressing"
                                    address="http://localhost/genericreplyA"
                                    bindingType="customBinding"
                                    bindingConfiguration="defaultBinding" />
            </
service>
            <
service serviceType="SimpleAddressing.ReplyEndpointB, SimpleAddressing">
                <
endpoint contractType