New Features of WCF 4.0: Part V

Previous Articles

New Features of WCF 4.0 : Part I
New Features of WCF 4.0 : Part II
New Features of WCF 4.0 : Part III
New Features of WCF 4.0 : Part IV

Introduction

Microsoft.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio.NET 2010 ships a lot of new features in their underlying technologies. In this series of articles, I want to talk about the new features in the area of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in order to improve the development experience, enable more communication scenario, support new WS-* standards and provide a good integration with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).

The new features are essentially the following: simplified configuration, standard endpoints, IIS hosting without a SVC file, support for WS-Discovery, routing service, REST improvements, enhancements for the integration with WF to support workflow services, simple byte stream encoding and ETW tracing.

In this series of article, I will illustrate each feature explaining the principles and showing some examples.

Workflow Services

Workflow Service is a new approach to build integration solutions where we have a combination of WCF and WF programming model and related technologies into one paradigm. WF gives you a declarative programming model raising the level of abstraction when exposing and consuming the business logic. This is a very good technology to support the principles of an integration solution where we specify the orchestration of services (functionality exposed by the system to be integrated) as well as to expose this orchestration (the implementation of a business logic) as service.

WF provides a good model for implementing long-running orchestration that need to wait for external events in an asynchronous way. So, the combination of WCF and WF programming model and related technologies enable the developers to have a very robust workflow technology such as BizTalk Server or Oracle SOA. Of course, BizTalk Server and Oracle SOA (Workflow Services is a not substitutive product but a complement) are server solutions to execute orchestration in an enterprise environment to guarantee the quality of services such as performance and availability. The bottom line is we're replacing lines of code in the implementation of the service operation with a composition of activities.

The main artifacts to integrate WCF and WF in Microsoft.NET 4.0 are the workflow services, the new class WorkflowServiceHost and the set of WCF messaging and workflow activities. Workflow services are defined in XAML files with a .xamlx extension. These xamlx files contain the description of the workflow, the activities and endpoint configurations not defined in the configuration file.

In order to illustrate the concepts of Workflow Services, I will develop a solution to support the simple scenario where we receive a message, do some processing and send a response back to the client. This scenario could be very complex such as consuming external services, waiting for some events, and so on. The implementation strategy is to use Workflow Services paradigm and new features of WCF 4.0.

The first step is to open Visual Studio.NET 2010 and create a new project. In the New Project window, select the Workflow node and then WCF Workflow Service Application template (see Figure 1).



Figure 1

When the project is created, we have mainly two files, the Service1.xaml with the definition of the workflow and the Web.config with the application configuration specifically with configuration of the WCF service with configurations for endpoints, bindings and behaviors.

If you see the workflow designer, by default, the workflow service contains a Receive activity followed by a Send activity. The Receive activity enables that when one incoming message is received, then a new instance of the workflow is created. This behavior of configured by setting the CanCreateInstance property of the Receive activity to true. The Receive activity contains the GetData operation. You can change the name of the operation with OperationName property(see Figure 2).



Figure 2

The Receive activity also has the Content property for binding the incoming messages to local variables within the Sequence activity (see Figure 2). If you click on the Content property, the Content Definition window appears, and you see that incoming messages are bound to the data variable of type Int32 (see Figure 3).


Figure 3

You can see the list of variables associated to the Sequence activity by clicking on the Variables tab underneath the workflow designer (see Figure 4).


Figure 4

Let's create the EchoService as we've done in previous articles of the series. First of all, let's rename the service from Service1.xamlx to EchoService.xamlx in the Solution Explorer window as well as the ConfigurationName and Name properties of the Service in the Properties window (see Figure 5).


Figure 5

Next step is to change the name of the operation to GetMessage and define a new variable named inMessage of type String within the Sequence (see Figure 6).


Figure 6

Next step is to bind the Content property of the Receive activity to the inMessage variable (see Figure 7).


Figure 7

Next, let's bind the Content property of the Send activity to the pattern "Echo Message is {0}" where the parameter is the inMessage variable (see Figure 8).


Figure 8

In order to test this service, press the F5 key and the workflow service will be loaded in the ASP.NET Development Server and the WCF Test Client application is also launched. The WCF Test Client automatically connects to the service and uses the WSDL metadata to create the client-side artifacts. You can see that the WSDL file is generated by the Receive and Send activities in the workflow.

If you double-click on the GetMessage operation a new tab appears to fill the request data, then click on the Invoke button and see the results on the Response pane (see Figure 9).


Figure 9

Let's send complex messages to the workflow service as it would be in real scenarios. Let's define our complex user-defined data contract to have two string properties to convey the message payload. We need to add the EchoRequest class and a reference to the System.Runtime.Serialization.dll assembly (see Listing 1).

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;

namespace WorkflowServiceWCF40NewFeatures
{
[DataContract ]
public class EchoRequest
{
[DataMember ]
public string MessagePart1 { get ; set ; }

[DataMember ]
public string MessagePart2 { get ; set ; }
}
}

Listing 1

Next step is to define the echoRequest variable as type of EchoRequest data contract (see Figure 10).

Figure 10

Now, let's bind the incoming messages to the echoRequest variable using the Content property of the Receive activity (see Figure 11).

Figure 11

And let's change the output of the workflow service, by changing the Content property of the SendReply activity (see Figure 12).

Figure 12

Let's run and test the workflow service (see Figure 13).

Figure 13

Now that we have our workflow service solution, we need to host this service. You can host the service in the IIS (hosting a xamlx service is identical to svc service) or self-hosted (in a standalone process). It's remarkable to say that WCF 4.0 provides the needed artifacts to support long-running orchestrations as well as for correlating messages to the appropriate workflow service in the case of having multiple service instances.
Hosting a workflow service in IIS is identical to any WCF service. Indeed, we've tested the service in the ASP.NET Development Server environment, so it would work the same way in IIS environment. The bottom line is that your virtual directory representing your Web application has to contain the xamlx file (with the workflow definition), the web.config file and the bin directory containing the assemblies with the custom types and activities used by the workflow. In the web.config, you can configure any WCF endpoints and behaviors.

Hosting a workflow service in a standalone application is very simple too. You need to use the WorkflowServiceHost class. Let's illustrate this scenario with an example by creating a console application project and adding reference to the System.Activities.dll, System.Xaml.dll, System.ServiceModel.dll and System.ServiceModel.Activities.dll assemblies as well as to the project done in the previous sections with the definitions of the workflow services and related artifacts.

We also need to copy the xamlx file from the workflow service project to this console project. The reason is that workflow services are not compiled unlike the regular workflows.

Now let's add the necessary code to host the workflow service as shown in the Listing 2.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.ServiceModel.Description;
using System.ServiceModel.Activities;
using System.Xaml;

namespace WorkflowServiceHostApp
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string [] args)
{
WorkflowServiceHost serviceHost = new WorkflowServiceHost (XamlServices .Load("EchoService.xamlx" ), new Uri ("http://localhost:8080/Services/EchoService" ));
serviceHost.AddDefaultEndpoints();
serviceHost.Description.Behaviors.Add(new ServiceMetadataBehavior { HttpGetEnabled=true });
serviceHost.Open();

System.Console .WriteLine("Press any key to finish ..." );
System.Console .ReadLine();

serviceHost.Close();
}
}
}

Listing 2

Conclusion

In this series of article, I've explained the new features of WCF 4.0 through concepts and examples.