benjaminm's blog - Hosting WSE's SoapReceiver within an EnterpriseServices component

Friday, August 27, 2004

Hosting WSE's SoapReceiver within an EnterpriseServices component

Christian Weyer shows how to host WSE’s SoapReceiver within EnterpriseServices. This came up while we were watching Keith Ballinger do a code-driven presentation on WSE messaging.

The demo was illustrating using SoapReceiver within a Windows Form application, which highlights that SOAP messages can be received inside any .NET assembly. While this demo makes the point (and suggests some interesting application designs, such as having a user interface app host a service and listen for messages, as John Cavnar-Johnson mentions in the comments), this may not be an appropriate hosting situation, esepcially if you want it to run the application on a server, without user intervention. Don Box has a great series on the major hosting options within .NET (IIS, DCOM/ES and Windows Services) and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Christian’s question was ‘Can I host SoapReceiver within a ServicedComponent?’

Here’s my version of a solution to this problem, with all the steps you need to get to the spinning balls. The server code looks like this:

using System;
using System.EnterpriseServices;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Reflection;
using Microsoft.Web.Services2.Addressing;
using Microsoft.Web.Services2.Messaging;
[assembly : AssemblyKeyFile("keys.snk")]
[assembly : ApplicationName("WSE Hosting Example")]
[assembly : ApplicationActivation(ActivationOption.Server)]
[assembly : ApplicationAccessControl(false)]

public class WSESoapService : ServicedComponent, IProcessInitializer
{
      #region IProcessInitializer Members

      public void Shutdown()
      {
            Logger.LogMessage("Shutdown");
      }

      public void Startup(object punkProcessControl)
      {
            Uri uri = new Uri("soap.tcp://" + Dns.GetHostName() + ":4545/");
            EndpointReference epr = new EndpointReference(uri);
            // Add our WSE SoapService to the static collection of receivers,
            // giving the address we want to listen on and the CLR type that
            // will receive this message.
            SoapReceivers.Add(epr, typeof (MyService));
            Logger.LogMessage("Startup");
      }

      #endregion
}

// Here's our service that will receive messages
public class MyService : SoapService
{
      [SoapMethod("ReceiveMessage")]
      public void ReceiveMessage(string message)
      {
            Logger.LogMessage(message);
      }
}

internal class Logger
{
      internal static void LogMessage(string message)
      {
            // Log the messages to a file.
            StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(@"c:\wsemessages.txt", true);
            writer.WriteLine(message + "," + DateTime.Now);
            writer.Flush();
            writer.Close();
      }
}

To compile this code, save it in a file called WSESoapService.cs, then use the following command lines (assuming that you’ve got the Microsoft.Web.Services2.dll in the compilation directory since csc.exe wont look in the GAC for assemblies):

sn –k keys.snk
csc /target:library WSESoapService.cs /r:Microsoft.Web.services2.dll
regsvcs WSESoapService.dll

Then go to the computer manager and start the WSE Hosting Example COM+ application.

The client code looks like this:

using System;
using System.Net;
using Microsoft.Web.Services2.Addressing;
using Microsoft.Web.Services2.Messaging;

public class App
{
      public static void Main(string[] args)
      {
            Uri uri = new Uri("soap.tcp://" + Dns.GetHostName() + ":4545/");
            EndpointReference epr = new EndpointReference(uri);
            MySoapClient proxy = new MySoapClient(epr);
            proxy.SendMessage("Here's a message");
            Console.Write("Message Sent! Press any key to continue ...");
            Console.Read();
      }
}

// Proxy class to call the SoapReceiver Service
internal class MySoapClient : SoapClient
{
      public MySoapClient(EndpointReference epr) : base(epr){}

      public void SendMessage(string message)
      {
            base.SendOneWay("ReceiveMessage", message);
      }
}