Making WCF simple: best practices for testing, deploying and

managing WCF solutions in the big enterpriseJesus Rodriguez

CEO, Co-Founder Tellago, IncCEO, Co-Founder Tellago Studios, Inc

About me….

• Hackerpreneur• Co-Founder Tellago, Tellago Studios, Inc• Microsoft Architect Advisor• Microsoft MVP• Oracle ACE• Speaker, Author• http://weblogs.asp.net/gsusx • http://jrodthoughts.com • http://moesion.com

Agenda

• Exploring WCF Challenges in real world SO solutions

• Patterns, Techniques and Tools to enhance WCF-based solutions

• Demo, Demo, Demo, Demo…..• Q&A

What to expect

• 400 level session• Lots of code• Real world best practices• Continuous dialog

Real World Challenges, Real World Solutions

Sample Scenario

Account Service

Contacts

Service

CRM System

Client

Things that will drive you insane in SO solutions

• Service Versioning• Remove Endpoint-Coupling

Between Services and Clients• Managing WCF Configuration• WCF Services Availability• Monitoring Services• Security && Identity Management

There are solutions

Service Versioning

Challenges

• Versioning services imposes large degrees of changes on the clients

• Multiple versions of the same services might need to be running side by side

Solution: Use WCF Routing Service to abstract the communication across different service versions

Service v1

Routing ServiceClientService

v2

DEMO: Implementing Intelligently Available WCF Services Using WS-

Discovery

Remove Endpoint-Coupling Between Services and Clients

Challenges

• Clients are dependent on WCF endpoint changes• High availability requires the deployment of expensive

hardware solutions

Solution: Use WS-Discovery to adapt to endpoint changes

Service

ServiceClient

WS-Discovery Probe, Match

WS-Discovery Probe, Match

X

DEMO: Implementing Intelligently Available WCF Services Using WS-

Discovery

WCF Configuration Management

Challenges

• Complexity• Enforcing reusability and consistency across services,

clients and environments

Solution: Centralize WCF configuration

Service

Configuration Repository

Client

GET service/config

GET client/config

DEMO: Centralizing WCF Configuration

WCF Service Availability

Challenges

• Identifying when a service is available• Avoiding the need for executing service logic

Solution: Implement a Ping Operation Invoker

ServiceClient

Ping

Ping Operation Invoker

Ping Response

DEMO: Pinging WCF Services

Service Activity Monitoring

Challenges

• Instrument the message exchange between client and services

• Collect near real time metrics about the service runtime behavior

• Track the data exchange between clients and servicesSolution: Enable and extend service tracking

using the Windows Server AppFabric

ServiceClient

Tracking DB

AppFabric

Message Tracking Inspector

Tracking Data

Service

DEMO: Monitoring WCF Services

Other things that might drive you crazy

• Security • Identity management• Service dependency modeling• Interoperability • Governance• Testing

Summary

• Adopting WCF in big SO solutions can introduce some interesting challenges

• The extensibility of the WCF programming model together with well established patterns, tools and techniques that can help to address those challenges

• Start small, iterate, adopt what makes sense for your organization

Thanksjesus.rodriguez@tellago.com

http://www.tellago.com http://weblogs.asp.net/gsusx

http://jrodthoughts.com http://twitter.com/#!/jrodthoughts