The Baker's Dozen: A 13-Step Crash Course for Learning Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) : Page 6

Step 11: WCF Services for Non-.NET Clients, (Part 2 of 3)—Registering the Service
Before you consume the service with a non-.NET client, you need to register the service with IIS and ASP.NET 2.0. The .NET 3.0 Framework contains a utility called ServiceModelReg.exe that you can use, as follows:

   -- Location for ServiceModelReg.EXE
   -- "\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\
         Windows Communication Foundation"
   -- Syntax:
   ServiceModelReg.EXE -s:W3SVC/1/ROOT/TestWCFService

ServiceModelReg registers the service and creates the necessary script maps.

Step 12: WCF Services for Non-.NET Clients, (Part 3 of 3) (VFP)
Finally, you can also access the WCF XML Web service using a non-.NET client. Because I was a Visual FoxPro developer in a past life, I'll use VFP to consume the service. Here's a brief code sample:

   -- VFP code to consume a WCF service, 
   -- in the same way as an ASMX 
   LOCAL loBasicHttpBinding_IMyService 
     AS "XML Web Service"
   LOCAL loException, lcErrorMsg, loWSHandler
   loWSHand = NEWOBJECT("WSHandler",HOME() + 
      "FFC\_ws3client.vcx")
   loBasicHttpBinding = loWSHand.SetupClient(
      "http://localhost/WCFDemo/Service.svc?wsdl",
      "DemoService", "BasicHttpBinding_IMyService")

If you ever consumed ASMX services in VFP, you'll notice that the code is basically the same!

Step 13: WCF Security Options
With WCF, you are sending SOAP messages over all the supported protocols (TCP, HTTP, etc.) Therefore, you need to implement security (for authentication, encryption, etc.). WCF security is a complete topic in itself (see the Recommended Reading section for more on this topic), which is beyond the scope of this article.

Table 2 lists the main security modes for all the WCF communication bindings.

Contract

None

Transport

Message

Both

TransportWithMessageCredential

TransportCredentialOnly

You can specify security settings in the configuration files that you built in previous steps. For example, the following requires that messages must be passed with user credentials:

   <wsHttpBinding>
     <binding name="wsHttp">
       <security mode="Message">
         <message clientCredentialType=
            "UserName" />
       </security>
     </binding>
   </wsHttpBinding>
   

You can find the entire source code for this article on my Web site. For additional information, check out my blog.

Previous Page