I've found all kinds of information over the web, but none yet that can categorically answer the question.
This article on the MSDN is an argument against the RPC protocol, but doesn't specifically say it isn't supported.
This article demonstrates it is possible to extend the web service by hand. I'd prefer to avoid that, as it defeats the purpose of using a WSDL file.
There are sections of the MSDN with classes for dealing with RPC based SOAP messages in the framework, such as System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapRpcMethodAttribute.
The service I need to connect to is using the RPC/literal protocol and there is no chance of changing that.
The Service Stub generating tool (wsdl.exe) will not accept RPC/literal WSDL files.
I really need to use RPC/literal in my .NET 2.0 application. Is it possible?
Yes, it`s possible. You can do RPC with .NET Remoting clickme. However, this is considered a legacy technology and it is not used anymore. Please take a look at .NET WCF if you want to do some SOAP RPC.
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Background:
I am creating a webservices site which will provide many types of simple services over SOAP and possibly other protocols too. The goal is to make it easy to do for example conversions, RSS parsing, spam checks and many other types of work. The site will be targeted mostly at beginner developers.
My Problem:
I have never developed any C#, or .NET for that matter. I did hack some VB6 many years ago but that's it. Now I need some examples of doing RPC calls over SOAP in C#. I have tried to search the web, and Stack Overflow, to find this but didn't find many resources, and I have no idea how to rank the resources (which are old? which are incorrect? etc).
I have created a simple example service, which is called like this in PHP:
<?php
$client = new SoapClient('http://webservi.se/year'); //URL to the WSDL
echo $client->getCurrentYear(); //This method returns an integer, called "year"
?>
I now want to call this method as easily as possible in C#. All references and examples are very welcome. Where do I begin? Which classes/modules/whatever can I utilize?
The solution does not have to involve SOAP at all if there are better communication frameworks (the back end is meant to be extensible), but note that the server side is implemented in PHP on Unix so proprietary solutions from Microsoft are out of the question on the server side.
Note that I need this so I can write documentation possible for J. Random Web Developer to follow (even if they are on shared web hosting). I therefore think the best approach should be to do this in code only, but even other ways of doing this are of course welcome.
Prerequisites: You already have the service and published WSDL file, and you want to call your web service from C# client application.
There are 2 main way of doing this:
A) ASP.NET services, which is old way of doing SOA
B) WCF, as John suggested, which is the latest framework from MS and provides many protocols, including open and MS proprietary ones.
Adding a service reference step by step
The simplest way is to generate proxy classes in C# application (this process is called adding service reference).
Open your project (or create a new one) in visual studio
Right click on the project (on the project and not the solution) in Solution Explorer and click Add Service Reference
A dialog should appear shown in screenshot below. Enter the url of your wsdl file and hit Ok. Note that if you'll receive error message after hitting ok, try removing ?wsdl part from url.
I'm using http://www.dneonline.com/calculator.asmx?WSDL as an example
Expand Service References in Solution Explorer and double click CalculatorServiceReference (or whatever you named the named the service in the previous step).
You should see generated proxy class name and namespace.
In my case, the namespace is SoapClient.CalculatorServiceReference, the name of proxy class is CalculatorSoapClient. As I said above, class names may vary in your case.
Go to your C# source code and add the following
using WindowsFormsApplication1.ServiceReference1
Now you can call the service this way.
Service1Client service = new Service1Client();
int year = service.getCurrentYear();
I have done quite a bit of what you're talking about, and SOAP interoperability between platforms has one cardinal rule: CONTRACT FIRST. Do not derive your WSDL from code and then try to generate a client on a different platform. Anything more than "Hello World" type functions will very likely fail to generate code, fail to talk at runtime or (my favorite) fail to properly send or receive all of the data without raising an error.
That said, WSDL is complicated, nasty stuff and I avoid writing it from scratch whenever possible. Here are some guidelines for reliable interop of services (using Web References, WCF, Axis2/Java, WS02, Ruby, Python, whatever):
Go ahead and do code-first to create your initial WSDL. Then, delete your code and re-generate the server class(es) from the WSDL. Almost every platform has a tool for this. This will show you what odd habits your particular platform has, and you can begin tweaking the WSDL to be simpler and more straightforward. Tweak, re-gen, repeat. You'll learn a lot this way, and it's portable knowledge.
Stick to plain old language classes (POCO, POJO, etc.) for complex types. Do NOT use platform-specific constructs like List<> or DataTable. Even PHP associative arrays will appear to work but fail in ways that are difficult to debug across platforms.
Stick to basic data types: bool, int, float, string, date(Time), and arrays. Odds are, the more particular you get about a data type, the less agile you'll be to new requirements over time. You do NOT want to change your WSDL if you can avoid it.
One exception to the data types above - give yourself a NameValuePair mechanism of some kind. You wouldn't believe how many times a list of these things will save your bacon in terms of flexibility.
Set a real namespace for your WSDL. It's not hard, but you might not believe how many web services I've seen in namespace "http://www.tempuri.org". Also, use a URN ("urn:com-myweb-servicename-v1", not a URL-based namespace ("http://servicename.myweb.com/v1". It's not a website, it's an abstract set of characters that defines a logical grouping. I've probably had a dozen people call me for support and say they went to the "website" and it didn't work.
</rant> :)
If you can get it to run in a browser then something as simple as this would work
var webRequest = WebRequest.Create(#"http://webservi.se/year/getCurrentYear");
using (var response = webRequest.GetResponse())
{
using (var rd = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
{
var soapResult = rd.ReadToEnd();
}
}
Take a look at "using WCF Services with PHP". It explains the basics of what you need.
As a theory summary:
WCF or Windows Communication Foundation is a technology that allow to define services abstracted from the way - the underlying communication method - they'll be invoked.
The idea is that you define a contract about what the service does and what the service offers and also define another contract about which communication method is used to actually consume the service, be it TCP, HTTP or SOAP.
You have the first part of the article here, explaining how to create a very basic WCF Service.
More resources:
Using WCF with PHP5.
Aslo take a look to NuSOAP. If you now NuSphere this is a toolkit to let you connect from PHP to an WCF service.
You're looking in the wrong place. You should look up Windows Communication Framework.
WCF is used both on the client and on the server.
Here you can find a nice tutorial for calling a NuSOAP-based web-service from a .NET client application. But IMO, you should also consider the WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP (WSO2 WSF/PHP) for servicing. See WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP 2.0 Significantly Enhances Industry’s Only PHP Library for Creating Both SOAP and REST Services. There is also a webminar about it.
Now, in .NET world I also encourage the use of WCF, taking into account the interoperability issues. An interoperability example can be found here, but this example uses a PHP-client + WCF-service instead of the opposite. Feel free to implement the PHP-service & WFC-client.
There are some WCF's related open source projects on codeplex.com that I found very productive. These projects are very useful to design & implement Win Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation applications: Smart Client, Web Client and Mobile Client. They can be used in combination with WCF to wisely call any kind of Web services.
Generally speaking, the patterns & practices team summarize good practices & designs in various open source projects that dealing with the .NET platform, specially for the web. So I think it's a good starting point for any design decision related to .NET clients.
I searched a lot, apologies if I missed something obvious. And thanks for reading the looong text below.
I have a 3rd party (read: No way to access/change the source) application here. It consists of a server (Windows service) and an API, that talks to the server via remoting.
For several reasons I'd like to expose this API over WCF (see subject: One reason is a WCF client).
The problem is, the API is
unchangeable (follows 3rd party rule)
using no WCF itself (it is serializable/MarshalByRef where necessary for Remoting)
using lots of interfaces and internal implementation classes
Following 1 I cannot use the (quite intrusive) WCF attributes myself.
Following 2 the API itself can be used "over the wire" (they support remoting via TCP and HTTP), but remoting is not good enough for me.
Following 3 I have mostly interfaces (which WCF won't handle well, cannot (de-)serialize). The implementation classes could be sent over, but - I cannot access them.
The general usage for this API is based on a single interface (and its members/properties), so the typical usage is like
var entryPoint = new ApiClientEntryPoint();
entryPoint.SomeMethodCall();
entryPoint.PropertyExposingAnInterface.SomeOtherMethodCall();
and so on.
What I'd really like to do is generate (with as little effort/code as possible) a proxy (not in the typical WCF sense) that I expose via WCF and that serializes this hierarchy mapping every call/property on the client to the real thing on the server.
The closest I've come so far is stumbling upon this project, but I wonder if there are more/other tools available that take a medium to large part of this work off my shoulder.
If there are any general other advices, better approaches to wrap something preexisting and unchangable into WCF, please share.
My advice is to use a facade pattern. Create a new WCF service that is specific to your usage and wrap the 3rd party service. Clients would talk to your service and you would talk to the 3rd party. But clients would not talk to the 3rd party directly.
This would work in most but not all scenarios. I'm not sure of your particular scenario so YMMV.
BTW you can look at WCF RIA Services which is good for exposing services to Silverlight where you can avoid doing a lot of the hand coding of service stuff. But again depending on your particular scenario it might not be the best way to go.
Edit:
It's now clear that the API is too big and/or the usage patterns of the clients are too varied in order to effectively use a facade. The only other thing I can suggest is to look at using a code generation tool. Use reflection (assuming it is a .NET API?) to pull apart the API and then codegen new services using the details you gathered. You could look at the T4 templates built into Visual Studio or you could look at a more "robust" tool such as CodeSmith. But I'm guessing this would be some painful code to write. I'm not aware of an automated solution for this.
Is the API well documented? If so, is the documentation in a parseable format such as XML or well-structured HTML? In that case you might be able to codegen from the documentation as opposed to reflecting through the code. This might be quicker depending on the particulars.
Okay, hair brained scheme #1 on my side:
Use Visual Studio Refactor menu to "extract interface" on 'ApiClientEntryPoint'.
Create a new WCF service which implements the above Interface and get VS to generate the method stubs for you.
'For PropertyExposingAnInterface.SomeOtherMethodCall' You will have to flatten the interfaces as there is no concept of a "nested" service operation.
Your only other option will be to use T4 code gen ,which will probably take longer than the above idea.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 1 year ago.
Improve this question
Background:
I am creating a webservices site which will provide many types of simple services over SOAP and possibly other protocols too. The goal is to make it easy to do for example conversions, RSS parsing, spam checks and many other types of work. The site will be targeted mostly at beginner developers.
My Problem:
I have never developed any C#, or .NET for that matter. I did hack some VB6 many years ago but that's it. Now I need some examples of doing RPC calls over SOAP in C#. I have tried to search the web, and Stack Overflow, to find this but didn't find many resources, and I have no idea how to rank the resources (which are old? which are incorrect? etc).
I have created a simple example service, which is called like this in PHP:
<?php
$client = new SoapClient('http://webservi.se/year'); //URL to the WSDL
echo $client->getCurrentYear(); //This method returns an integer, called "year"
?>
I now want to call this method as easily as possible in C#. All references and examples are very welcome. Where do I begin? Which classes/modules/whatever can I utilize?
The solution does not have to involve SOAP at all if there are better communication frameworks (the back end is meant to be extensible), but note that the server side is implemented in PHP on Unix so proprietary solutions from Microsoft are out of the question on the server side.
Note that I need this so I can write documentation possible for J. Random Web Developer to follow (even if they are on shared web hosting). I therefore think the best approach should be to do this in code only, but even other ways of doing this are of course welcome.
Prerequisites: You already have the service and published WSDL file, and you want to call your web service from C# client application.
There are 2 main way of doing this:
A) ASP.NET services, which is old way of doing SOA
B) WCF, as John suggested, which is the latest framework from MS and provides many protocols, including open and MS proprietary ones.
Adding a service reference step by step
The simplest way is to generate proxy classes in C# application (this process is called adding service reference).
Open your project (or create a new one) in visual studio
Right click on the project (on the project and not the solution) in Solution Explorer and click Add Service Reference
A dialog should appear shown in screenshot below. Enter the url of your wsdl file and hit Ok. Note that if you'll receive error message after hitting ok, try removing ?wsdl part from url.
I'm using http://www.dneonline.com/calculator.asmx?WSDL as an example
Expand Service References in Solution Explorer and double click CalculatorServiceReference (or whatever you named the named the service in the previous step).
You should see generated proxy class name and namespace.
In my case, the namespace is SoapClient.CalculatorServiceReference, the name of proxy class is CalculatorSoapClient. As I said above, class names may vary in your case.
Go to your C# source code and add the following
using WindowsFormsApplication1.ServiceReference1
Now you can call the service this way.
Service1Client service = new Service1Client();
int year = service.getCurrentYear();
I have done quite a bit of what you're talking about, and SOAP interoperability between platforms has one cardinal rule: CONTRACT FIRST. Do not derive your WSDL from code and then try to generate a client on a different platform. Anything more than "Hello World" type functions will very likely fail to generate code, fail to talk at runtime or (my favorite) fail to properly send or receive all of the data without raising an error.
That said, WSDL is complicated, nasty stuff and I avoid writing it from scratch whenever possible. Here are some guidelines for reliable interop of services (using Web References, WCF, Axis2/Java, WS02, Ruby, Python, whatever):
Go ahead and do code-first to create your initial WSDL. Then, delete your code and re-generate the server class(es) from the WSDL. Almost every platform has a tool for this. This will show you what odd habits your particular platform has, and you can begin tweaking the WSDL to be simpler and more straightforward. Tweak, re-gen, repeat. You'll learn a lot this way, and it's portable knowledge.
Stick to plain old language classes (POCO, POJO, etc.) for complex types. Do NOT use platform-specific constructs like List<> or DataTable. Even PHP associative arrays will appear to work but fail in ways that are difficult to debug across platforms.
Stick to basic data types: bool, int, float, string, date(Time), and arrays. Odds are, the more particular you get about a data type, the less agile you'll be to new requirements over time. You do NOT want to change your WSDL if you can avoid it.
One exception to the data types above - give yourself a NameValuePair mechanism of some kind. You wouldn't believe how many times a list of these things will save your bacon in terms of flexibility.
Set a real namespace for your WSDL. It's not hard, but you might not believe how many web services I've seen in namespace "http://www.tempuri.org". Also, use a URN ("urn:com-myweb-servicename-v1", not a URL-based namespace ("http://servicename.myweb.com/v1". It's not a website, it's an abstract set of characters that defines a logical grouping. I've probably had a dozen people call me for support and say they went to the "website" and it didn't work.
</rant> :)
If you can get it to run in a browser then something as simple as this would work
var webRequest = WebRequest.Create(#"http://webservi.se/year/getCurrentYear");
using (var response = webRequest.GetResponse())
{
using (var rd = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
{
var soapResult = rd.ReadToEnd();
}
}
Take a look at "using WCF Services with PHP". It explains the basics of what you need.
As a theory summary:
WCF or Windows Communication Foundation is a technology that allow to define services abstracted from the way - the underlying communication method - they'll be invoked.
The idea is that you define a contract about what the service does and what the service offers and also define another contract about which communication method is used to actually consume the service, be it TCP, HTTP or SOAP.
You have the first part of the article here, explaining how to create a very basic WCF Service.
More resources:
Using WCF with PHP5.
Aslo take a look to NuSOAP. If you now NuSphere this is a toolkit to let you connect from PHP to an WCF service.
You're looking in the wrong place. You should look up Windows Communication Framework.
WCF is used both on the client and on the server.
Here you can find a nice tutorial for calling a NuSOAP-based web-service from a .NET client application. But IMO, you should also consider the WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP (WSO2 WSF/PHP) for servicing. See WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP 2.0 Significantly Enhances Industry’s Only PHP Library for Creating Both SOAP and REST Services. There is also a webminar about it.
Now, in .NET world I also encourage the use of WCF, taking into account the interoperability issues. An interoperability example can be found here, but this example uses a PHP-client + WCF-service instead of the opposite. Feel free to implement the PHP-service & WFC-client.
There are some WCF's related open source projects on codeplex.com that I found very productive. These projects are very useful to design & implement Win Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation applications: Smart Client, Web Client and Mobile Client. They can be used in combination with WCF to wisely call any kind of Web services.
Generally speaking, the patterns & practices team summarize good practices & designs in various open source projects that dealing with the .NET platform, specially for the web. So I think it's a good starting point for any design decision related to .NET clients.
How to create Net.TCP WCF binding for\using SOAP 1.1? Is it posible?
If yes.
What do I need?
MSDN if there is any help on this.
Open Source Libs/wrappers.
Tutorials and blog articles on How to do it.
If no: I need know where did you get the information from (link to MSDN or other official WCF information resource).
SOAP is an XML format.
Net tcpbinding is a binary format.
They are two different things.
What you can do is to expose a service with 2 endpoints, one SOAP and one binary.
I think if you need a SOAP/TCP protocol (SOAP-based or XML Infoset-based) and you want to keep your solution open for interoperability like WCF - WSIT (Java) you need to use a tool like WCF-Xtensions from Noemax.
http://www.noemax.com/global/press_releases/september_24_2007.html
Oracle has a SOAP/TCP recommendation, but I don’t really see a lot of out of the box components, etc which implement it. It is a shame because it is pretty fast and works on both Java and .NET
http://java.sun.com/webservices/reference/apis-docs/soap-tcp-v1.0.pdf
I am not aware of free components. If you know any please comment on my post. I am working on a WCF - WSIT (Metro) integration project and WS-Http turned out to be very slow.
I think TCP binding also uses SOAP protocol, but within SOAP message it uses binary encoding instead of text. For more clarification please see this article:
http://forums.asp.net/t/1864812.aspx/1
MSDN:
Chapter 7: Message and Transport Security
So I have ASP.NET running on the server in IIS7. I think I'm going to use MVC for some static pages and basic dynamic forms - but the majority of the client side is written in Flash/ActionScript.
What's the simplest, most succint, most DRY way of building/generating proxies between client and server?
Which format should I use?
JSON
SOAP
Binary
And which comms protocol should I use?
WCF
HTTP via MVC Controller actions
I'm probably missing some format or protocol, but basically it should be relatively efficient, not require alot of plumbing code and preferably auto-generates client-side proxies.
WSDL web services are very easy to consume in Flash and simple to create in .NET.
I'd also suggest you at least look into AMF, which is Adobe's proprietary binary format for exchanging data between client and server. There are a couple of implementations for .NET, including amf.net and weborb.
I've never used it, but I've heard really great things about weborb: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/weborb-for-net/overview.html
i've consumed JSON in swfs .. pretty simple using a3corelib stuff
I have had a good experience with FluorineFX.net - It appears to be very similar to WebORB but its free and open source. I don't think Flash/ActionScript supports WCF..
You should note that (in the research I've done) there is no way to send a packed from the server to the client - the client must make all requests.
We use Weborb at my work. I highly recommend it. There are some gotchas with the way Weborb handles serialization on both ends. Just make sure in your .NET classes you don't have member names the same as class names.
EDIT: The free developer edition of Weborb should meet most people's needs. Weborb has the distinct advantage of speed, because it uses the binary AMF format to talk over the wire instead of JSON or SOAP.
I second WebORB. It uses the AMF protocol which is that fastest way to get data in and out. You can easily expose your .NET services and have typed objects going in and out. You can use RMI and Messaging. It's a free product and does a great job...
WCF supports Flash..! Done with "AJAX-enabled WCF Service" and WebInvoke(Method = "POST")