WCF Tip: Using Properties in Service Contracts

You can easily create services by creating an application that is installed as a service. For example, suppose you want to monitor performance counter data and react to threshold values. You could write a Windows Service application that listens to the performance counter data, deploy the application, and begin collecting and analyzing data.

This article is meant to be a practical discussion guide to building a .NET application in a service-oriented architecture. We will consider real-world goals, real-world obstacles, and experience-based solutions. I quickly concede the approaches discussed here are not exhaustive or infallible. This paper is focused on application development, not application integration. We will specifically consider architectural issues and component design issues.

The Potential of Web Services

If the reason that motivated the change from automatically implemented property to explicitly implemented property was to change the semantics of the property then you should evaluate whether the desired semantics when accessing the property from within the class are identical to or different from the desired semantics when accessing the property from outside the class.

WS UploadService is a web service written for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and is meant for uploading documents into SharePoint. I have just uploaded the zip file to GotDotNet.com so it will take some time before the zip file appears in the list of downloads. For the time being, you can download the zip file from the following location

When you begin to develop appliations with WPF, you will soon stumble across DependencyProperties. They look quite similar to normal .NET properties, but the concept behind is much more complex and powerful

In addition to letting you create Web pages, Microsoft Visual Studio also lets you create Web services that use ASP.NET XML. Creating a Web service in Visual Studio is similar to creating a Web page. You can also use the Microsoft Visual Web Developer Web development tool to reference and use Web services that are in a Visual Web Developer solution, on your local computer or in a local or external UDDI directory. In this walkthrough, you will create the Web service in one solution and use it in another.

Tasks illustrated in this walkthrough include:

Creating a simple XML Web service in Visual Web Developer.

Creating a separate Web site that uses the Web service.