MSDN has a very nice article on how to create a windows service that hosts a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service. It explains all the details of doing this in a step by step fashion. One thing that I often find missing from these articles is the actual Visual Studio project that I can download and play with. What I usually do is put that together myself (which I’m sure is the author’s intent).
To save anyone some time who wants to do the same thing, I’ve created a VS2010 project from the example, added a very simple Windows C# console application that consumes the service, as well as made some small changes in a very nice Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) calculator project so that the calculator does it operations inside the windows service rather than in the calculator itself.
In this article, I’ve attached the source code (with my small changes and additions) for you to work with and change as you like.
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Over the past couple years, the focus of the web development I’ve been doing involves building highly flexible, highly scalable and straight forward web sites to implement and maintain Line of Business (LOB) applications. As you can probably tell from my posts, I’m very “practical” focused, and at the same time have a desire to build awesome web applications.
The technology pairing I’ve chosen is Microsoft’s .Net platform with MVC on the server, and ExtJS on the client. Though it’s possible to still use ExtJS with standard html/aspx pages, I’ve found the best combination is to use 100% JavaScript on the client (ExtJS) and have all the server side technology be 100% service based. I’ve used LINQ2SQL extensively as well as Entity Framework in the latest Visual Studio 2010 release.
The learning curve was quite steep to actually be able to efficiently build highly flexible, highly scalable applications using these technologies, but now that I know it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’m considering putting together a series of 4 Day Classes around the country (or even world) that would basically teach people the methods and patterns I’ve learned and essentially leap frog a development team into being able to quickly do what it has taken me years to figure out. I’ve been fortunate enough to know the top 1% instructors and I’m sure with the right incentive, can get them to join me in both putting together these classes as well as teaching them.
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