I am using .Net 2.0 framework and would like to call a function in Windows service from a web service. Is this possible? And If yes, how much control I will have over the function i.e passing parameters, getting the result back etc. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated :)
Remoting is your best option if you need to pass parameter values.
If you don't need to share objects or anything too complex, ServiceController is probably easier.
You can do it through .NET remoting. If you go that route, it will appear you are calling a method and getting a result, but all your parameters will be serialized over the wire, and the result will be serialized back. Therefore, everything must be made serializable.
How about hosting a WCF service inside of the Windows Service. You can use net.tcp or named pipes to communicate between "your" web service and the one in the Windows Service. You can use the NetDataContractSerializer for serialization with type fidelity.
You could implement a basic http server that maps certain requests to functions. Query-string will be mapped to parameters. Actually not hard and I have done this in the past (as I provided some rudimentary template-based reporting). It wasn't dynamically, but it could be done dynamically. Look at HttpListener for a starting point. You could as well host the asp.net engine in it.
It has it advantages and disadvantages.
Why not package the function in its own DLL then distribute it with the Windows Service and the Web Service separately?
Create service project what export an interface COM or use PIPE to transfer data.
View this Interprocess Communication using Named Pipes in C#
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I am building an iOS app that should communicate with a WCF Rest Service. They both will be on the same local network. While testing a have hardcoded the IP of the service, but that wont work when it will be deployed.
How can i get the service address, or connect to it in any way?
I was reading about WCF discovery but I don't know how I would implement this in iOS.
If it is of any help, im using WCF REST Service Template 40(CS)
Any help would be appreciated.
EDIT: How about using bonjour? Any thoughts?
WCF Discovery is an implementation of the WS-Discovery specification, which is an open standard. As such there are a few implementations of it, for example one in Java called java-ws-discovery, one in Python called python-ws-discovery and one in c sharp called WS Discovery proxy.
I haven't found an implementation in Objective-C but given those three are all open source you may be able to port one, or at least the part you need (depending on whether you are able to understand one of those languages).
I've found code samples for calling a JSON service, but I'm not sure how to add multiple parameters. Could somebody help me out?
My JSON Service is a .NET WCF service SearchTalent(talentName, agentName, agencyName)
I think you will need to find out the URL's of the service, not the .Net representation of the service.
I'd suggest you use Restkit to interface with the service once you know the urls. You might want to look into that.
apologies in advance for this question being dumb, or previously covered. I have researched far and wide but have not found any resources on WCF/ Windows Services that cover this question.
I have a managed Windows Service which is working nicely. Every n (>5) seconds it checks on the status (e.g. memory consumption) of some processes and other Windows services and also does some database logging and raises events where necessary.
I intend to make an ASP.NET website that would allow users to query the status of the processes that the Windows Service is monitoring. Having researched the options it looks like the up-to-date method would be to use a WCF Service, hosted in the Windows Service, to act as intermediary between the ASP.NET website and the Windows Service. Such that, a user could request through the browser a snapshot of the current status of whatever set of processes the Windows Service was monitoring, and have this request and subsequent response relayed through the WCF service (using named pipes, I think).
So, my difficulty is that there a set of methods and events in the Windows Service for which a single root object exists (let's say MonitorObject). I don't see how the ServiceHost can be instantiated with the reference to MonitorObject so that the WCF Service can call the methods in the Windows Service. I am thinking that perhaps I need to make the Monitor object a shared (I am VB'ing) member of the Windows Service class (that contains OnStart and OnStop) and make all the events shared so that the WCF Service can just access the WindowsService.SharedMonitorObject without needing to be passed the object....
However, I am lost in the subject and am seeking any advice on how best to proceed.
Thanks in advance.
I think you're going down the right track. I wouldn't necessarily make the entire MonitorObject shared, but you might put a shared method in that object that will return the single root object to the caller.
There is a design pattern called the Singleton Pattern that will help you with this. Jon Skeet has written an excellent article on some of the things to be aware of when using this pattern in .NET. His article uses C# for the examples, but here's a SO question referencing this pattern using VB.
While it's unclear from your description, my guess is that your Windows Service is essentially single-threaded right now. Just keep in mind that once you add the WCF service, you'll need to make the methods that it references thread-safe.
Simple. I created a LINQ-TO-SQL Entity model, created a website, added a Data Service (*.svc) to this site and made sure it works by writing a simple .NET console application. The service works fine and cannot be modified.
Now I'm going to write a Delphi application (2007) for WIN32 which will have to call this data service. And while Delphi has no major problems importing a SOAP service, it can't import this service since it provides no WSDL...
So, two options. I could figure out how to generate a WSDL based on this data service or I'll have to find another way to consume this service. (Or just give up, but I hate to quit this challenge.) So, any advise?
ADO.NET Data Services are REST services. They are not SOAP WebServices and I don't think REST uses WSDL. You can call REST services from Delphi using HTTP GET/PUT/POST/DELETE. You could use Indy's TIdHTTPClient. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668786.aspx for url examples. The results are in the Atom format, which is a XML format. You could parse it with TXMLDocument. They can also return JSON.
Maybe you can use the project Jedi "url grabber" components to consume the service. I have managed to get live share data using these in the past. I do not know exactly how your setup works, but maybe these can be helpful.
http://www.delphi-jedi.org/
You should also look at synapse, a small easy to use library which works well with REST. The latest version, which can be downloaded via SVN, works well in Delphi 2009.
I have some delphi code which, given a list of items, calculates the total price taking into account any special deals that might apply.
This code is non-trivial to rewrite in another language.
How should I set it up to communicate with a website running on the same server? The website will need to ask it for a price every time the user updates their shopping cart. It's possible that there will be multiple concurrent requests.
The delphi code needs to maintain an in-memory list of special deals, periodically refreshed from a database. So it cannot simply be executed every time or anything as simple as that.
I don't know what the website is written in, or even which http server it runs under, so I'm just looking for ideas or standard methods.
It sounds like the win32 app is already running as a Windows Service on the box. So, if you can't modify that service, you are going to have to deal with whatever way it wants to accept and respond to requests. This could be through sockets or some higher level communication protocol like web services.
You could do a couple of things. Write an assembly that knows how to communicate with the service and have your web site use that assembly. Or you could build a shim service that knows how to communicate with the legacy service, but exposes communication over higher level protocols such as web services. Either way will have the benefit of hiding the concurrency, threading and communications issue behind an easy to call interface, but the latter will make communicating with the service easier for everyone going forward.
If you can modify the delphi app to take an XML request and respond with an XML answer over a TCP socket (ideally using the HTTP protocol), you will be able to make it interoperate with most web server frameworks relatively easily. But the exact details of how to make that integration happen will depend on the language/framework it was written in.
If the web server is on windows you can compile your delphi app as a DLL that can return XML or HTML, taking parameters as part of the URL or a POST operation. Some details on making a Delphi DLL for web servers are here.
It doesn't matter what web server or OS the existing system is running under. What matters is what you want YOUR code to run under. If it is windows then the easiest solution would be to use WebBroker and write a custom ISAPI application, or use SOAP to expose web services. The first method could be used if you wanted to write a rest like API for instance, the second if your web application has the ability to consume web services.
Another option, if you are running both on the same box under IIS, is to create a COM/Automation object which you then invoke via server side scripting (ASP). If the application is an ASP.NET application, then I would use PRISM to port your code into an assembly.
I have done this with a quite complicated workers compensation calculator. I created a windows service using RemObjects Sdk. The calculations are exposed as a soap method so it can be accessed by nearly anything.
It's not necessary to use RemObjects in the service but it makes it much easier to do as it handles a lot of the underlying plumbing. The clients don't need RemObjects, they just need to be able to call soap methods. Nearly any programming langugae can do that.
You could also create an isapi dll for IIS that exposes a soap interface. This would be useful if other websites on different servers needed access to the methods. However I have handled this in my case by opening a port in the firewall to access my windows service.
There is a lot of examples on the web. A couple of places to start reading are About.Com and Dr Bob.
Torn this app into Windows Service. Write Web Service that will communicate with your windows service. You should spend some time designing your Web Service, because this Web Service is going to be your consistent interface, shielding old Delphi app. So in the future whenever you will want to write web app, mobile app, or whatever you will imagine, you will have one consistent interface – XML Web Service.
A popular way to integrate a web application with background services is a message broker.
The message flow would be:
the web application sends a "calculation request" message to a message destination on the message broker, which contains all needed parameters and also a correlation id to match the calculation request with the response from the Delphi service
one (or, in a high availability / load balanced environment more) Delphi services handle the messages: pull the next incoming message, process it by feeding the parameters to the calculation engine, and send a "calculation result message" back to the web server
the web server can either synchronously wait for the response (and discard responses which have no matching correlation ide) and build the result HTML document, or continue with other tasks and asynchronously receive the calculation result in a separate thread, for example in a Ajax based web application
See for an introduction this slideshow about the Dopplr image service:
http://de.slideshare.net/carsonified/dopplr-its-made-of-messages-matt-biddulph-presentation
If you can make it a service (but not a library), you have to do inter-process communication somehow - there are a few ways to do this on Windows:
Sockets directly which is hardest since you have to do marshalling/auth yourself
Shared Memory (yuck!)
RPC which works great but isn't trivial
DCOM which is easier but a pain to configure
WCF - but can you call it from your Windows Service written in Delphi?