Category Archive

It seems to be that Patterns & Practices team continues to do what they do the best – creating guidance within different development areas.

The last release of this group is the WCF Security Guidance. It contains description for a few application scenarios & a list of various How-Tos, including few video walkthroughs of common WCF solutions.

It’s different from usual way to dig into WCF infrastructure details. It’s not crawling over hundreds of MSDN pages, it’s not like reading MSDN samples trying to understand what’s going on.

It is a very detailed step-by-step description on how to do some tasks touching different aspects of WCF, starting from opening a certificates store, and ending with deployment advices.

Keep it going, P&P!

WCF infrastructure allows you to store context sensitive data in InstanceContext of the service instance. For that you should implement from IExtension<InstanceContext> and plug that class into WCF’s infrastructure in any of available ways.

When I worked on a class that can store contextual information in Web context or WCF context depending on some configuration parameters, I preferred to have similar idioms, and I wrote an HttpContext-like class for WCF.

///<summary>
/// This class incapsulates context information for a service instance
///</summary>
public class WcfInstanceContext : IExtension<InstanceContext>
{
    private readonly IDictionary items;

    private WcfInstanceContext()
    {
        items = new Hashtable();
    }

    ///<summary>
    /// <see cref="IDictionary"/> stored in current instance context.
    ///</summary>
    public IDictionary Items
    {
        get { return items; }
    }

    ///<summary>
    /// Gets the current instance of <see cref="WcfInstanceContext"/>
    ///</summary>
    public static WcfInstanceContext Current
    {
        get
        {
            WcfInstanceContext context = OperationContext.Current.InstanceContext.Extensions.Find<WcfInstanceContext>();
            if (context == null)
            {
                context = new WcfInstanceContext();
                OperationContext.Current.InstanceContext.Extensions.Add(context);
            }
            return context;
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// <see cref="IExtension{T}"/> Attach() method
    /// </summary>
    public void Attach(InstanceContext owner) { }

    /// <summary>
    /// <see cref="IExtension{T}"/> Detach() method
    /// </summary>
    public void Detach(InstanceContext owner) { }

}

Now, you can use this class to store and retrieve data in the same manner as you’re working with HttpContext:

    WcfInstanceContext.Current.Items["key"] = new MyClass();
    MyClass myClass = WcfInstanceContext.Current.Items["key"] as MyClass;

Of course, when doing this you should be inside of WCF session…

Enjoy!