XBAPs Part 2: Consuming WCF services from an XBAP

Introduction

One of the big improvements to XBAPs in .NET 3.5 is the ability to consume WCF services. Nowadays Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are very popular and used almost everywhere. This all makes sense, as SOA is very scalable, and for many cases it is the best approach to take for a project; so why not enable SOA for XBAPs as well. To tell you the truth, you could consume WCF services from XBAP in .NET 3.0, yet the XBAP had to have Full Trust, and not Partial Trust, which usually spells trouble. Anyway we don’t have to worry much about this now because .NET 3.5 enables XBAPs to consume WCF services even in Partial Trust. Read more about this and it’s limitations here.

Setting up our workspace

Ok so let’s start by creating a simple WCF service. Open Visual Studio and create a WCF service by clicking File > New > Project and then select Web > WCF Service application

I am not going to cover the basics of how to create a WCF service, yet by default the WCF Service Visual Studio template creates a simple service for us already (called IService). So yes, if you hit F5 and run the service you will already have a service up and running. Once we have our simple service let’s create a Simple XBAP in the same solution (in order to do this please refer to my previous post).

Now that we have both the WCF service and the XBAP how are we going to make them communicate? Well, thanks to Visual Studio this is super simple. All you have to do is Right click the XBAP project, select the “Add Service Reference” option and a Dialog will pop up:

Please Note: If you do not run the service you will get an error while expanding the Tree nodes of the service in this Dialog. If the service is not running Visual Studio cannot get the Metadata of the service, since this is just another EndPoint of the service. In order to run the service just Right Click on Service1.svc and select View in Browser.

Ok, now that we added the Service Reference, Visual Studio will go to work and generate a Proxy class for us. We will use this proxy class to communicate with the WCF service. By default the Proxy class is called <Name of service>Client so in our case it will be called Service1Client. This proxy class will have a method for every OperationContract we have in our service. You can also choose to create an Async version of the service. In order to do so just right click the Service1 (in the XBAP project that got created when we added the Service Reference) and select Configure Service Reference.

In this dialog check the Generate Async operations checkbox and Visual Studio will add an async version of the OperationContracts for you (Thank you VS… we love you 🙂 )

The first error you’ll see

Ok now that we have everything set up lets do a simple button in our XBAP and in the Click event handler call a method. Something like this….

   1: private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:     Service1Client client = new Service1Client();

   4:     MessageBox.Show(client.GetData(1));

   5: }

Let’s hit F5 and run our XBAP and see what happens.

AND BAMMMM a big ugly exception is thown.

InvalidOperationException

The WSHttpBinding with name WSHttpBinding failed validation because it contains a BindingElement with type System.ServiceModel.Channels.SymmetricSecurityBindingElement which is not supported in partial trust

which in VS looks like this

Yet I promised you guys that WCF is supported in Partial trust XBAPs…. And it is, it’s just that the default WCF EndPoint is not 🙂 By default a WCF Service has it’s EndPoint set up as WsHTTPBinding which is not supported in Partial trust XBAPs. In order to fix this Right click the app.config of your service and select “Edit WCF Configuration” (if this option is not available go to Tools > WCF Service Configuration Editor then select open and specify the path of your App.config. Once you have the app.config opened in the editor Expand the Bindings Node and select the node under that. Open the Security tab and choose None as security level.

Once that’s done run the app again.

The Second error you’ll see

And this time it’s a SecurityException saying

Request for the permission of type ‘System.Net.WebPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ failed.

In order to fix this Go to the XBAP project Properties and select Debug tab. Select the Start External Program option and enter the following exe path “C:\WINDOWS\System32\PresentationHost.exe” and in the Command Line arguments text field enter the following

-debug <Path of XBAP> –debugSecurityZoneUrl <URL of service>

in my case it was

-debug “D:\net resources\My Blog\XBAPAndWCF\XBAPClient\bin\Debug\XBAPClient.xbap” -debugSecurityZoneUrl http://localhost:53265/Service1.svc

[Update]

Thanks to Mark Smith I discovered a new an easier way of doing this. All you have to do is

1) Open XBAP project properties

2) Select Security tab

3) Advanced button

4) Check “Grant application access to site of origin” (should be checked already)

5) Type in the URL into the textbox where the web service is running

We have to do this so that we set up an envirorment for the XBAP just like it is running from the same URL of the service.

Conclusion

And there you have it. Now you should be armed and ready to start doing XBAPs that consume WCF service.

Download sample application