I was used to create web service but then I was once working
on a migration application project where I was supposed to convert all web
services to WCF services. I was new to it. I still am. But will little hands on
experience. Let me share how I learned creating and consuming WCF services
Ok before that. my manager asked me a simple questions . “Supreet, what do you know about message binding, contracts, and endpoints?” without which you cannot proceed with
it.
I said “I don’t know
technical definitions. What I know is you should know:
Where the service located
is
How can we communicate or
consume the service,
And what the parameters the service seeks
are.”
Now that suffices completely. You can now map it with
technical jargons.
I thought of simple webpage with functionality of doing
mathematical calculation to learn WCF
I created new Projects from Visual studio 2013 of type WCF
be application
Now I created a class (svc file )which was supposed to be an
interface and define the methods to be implemented later . called
IMathService.svc
[ServiceContract]
public interface IMathService
{
[OperationContract]
Int32 Sum(Int32 a, Int32 b);
[OperationContract]
Int32 difference(Int32 a, Int32 b);
[OperationContract]
Int32 Product(Int32 a, Int32 b);
}
}
Now I declared a class which can actually implement the
interface class for maths operation
public class MathService : IMathService
{
public Int32 Sum(Int32 a, Int32 b)
{
return a+b;
}
public Int32 difference(Int32 a, Int32 b)
{
return a-b;
}
public Int32 Product(Int32 a, Int32 b)
{
return a * b;
}
}
}
Now my service is ready to use.
Let see how we can consume this service. To do that, I created
a Simple User Interface which holds UI controls to do maths calculation and
display result.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
num1
<asp:TextBox ID="txt1Num1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
num2
<asp:TextBox ID="txtNum2" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
<asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1" runat="server">
<asp:ListItem>Add</asp:ListItem>
<asp:ListItem>sub</asp:ListItem>
<asp:ListItem>product</asp:ListItem>
</asp:DropDownList>
result
<asp:TextBox ID="txtResult" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
<asp:Button ID="btnDisplay" runat="server" Text="Display" OnClick="btnDisplay_Click" />
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Now the most important thing is to add the web reference to
consume it
Now on the button click event I implemented the
corresponding functionality
using MathApp.ServiceReference1;
namespace MathApp
{
public partial class WebForm1 : System.Web.UI.Page
{
MathServiceClient client = new MathServiceClient();
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void btnDisplay_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if(DropDownList1.SelectedItem.Text=="Add")
{
var res = client.Sum(Int32.Parse(txt1Num1.Text), Int32.Parse(txtNum2.Text));
txtResult.Text=res.ToString();
}
else if (DropDownList1.SelectedItem.Text == "sub")
{
var res = client.difference(Int32.Parse(txt1Num1.Text), Int32.Parse(txtNum2.Text));
txtResult.Text =
res.ToString();
}
else
{
var res = client.Product(Int32.Parse(txt1Num1.Text), Int32.Parse(txtNum2.Text));
txtResult.Text =
res.ToString();
}
}
}
}
That’s it. You are now ready to test the WCF service. Run
the solution
So that’s how I tried to make it very simple to learn how to
Create WCF services.
By the way the technically endpoint, binding and contract
details are available in the web.config as below
<endpoint address="http://localhost:18647/MathService.svc" binding="basicHttpBinding"
bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_IMathService" contract="ServiceReference1.IMathService"
name="BasicHttpBinding_IMathService" />
Will post more on advanced way of creating WCF service
