I've just read this interesting article regarding simultaneously calling multiple methods on a WCF service from Silverlight:
http://weblogs.asp.net/olakarlsson/archive/2010/05/20/simultaneously-calling-multiple-methods-on-a-wcf-service-from-silverlight.aspx
The article states: "It turns out that the issue is founded in a mix of Silverlight, Asp.Net and WCF, basically if you’re doing multiple calls to a single WCF web-service and you have Asp.Net session state enabled, the calls will be executed sequentially by the service, hence any long running calls will block subsequent ones."
I am assuming that the blocking is only an issue if you are making multiple calls to the same service, and that two simultaneous calls to two different methods on two different services should not result in one blocking the other?
The suggested solution to the problem in SL3 involves using the following syntax in the Application_Startup method:
WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);
The session state will then have to be maintained on WCF calls by seting up a cookie container, and sharing it across all of your proxies (see http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/174322/393032.aspx)
Is this still the recommended solution in Silverlight 4? Has anyone used an alternative approach?
In .NET 4, you can do this in Application_BeginRequest
if (Context.Request.Path.EndsWith("xxx.svc"))
Context.SetSessionStateBehavior(SessionStateBehavior.Disabled);
If you are making a call into an ASP.Net application, and you are using session cookies, then all the calls into the application are serialized (apart from ones where the page explicitly opts out of session state).
Normally this isn't a big issue, because a client browser typically hits an ASP.Net page plus a bunch of resources (images, js, css etc...), and these latter aren't mapped to ASP.Net so IIS serves them up natively. But if you try and hit two ASP.Net pages at the same time (eg in a frameset) you will see them load up one after another.
Now I don't know that this happens with WCF, but based on what you say, if you see that behaviour for one service I would expect to see that for all of them, because the session is per-user, not per-service.
In ASP.Net you can 'opt out' of session state on a page by page basis. If that's possible for a hosted WCF service, and viable for your scenario (to make the services stateless) that would aleviate the issue. Or move one or more services to a different ASP.Net application (different session)
Bear in mind that you can see other issues here to do with the instancing and reentrancy models of the service. Your problem as described above is a per-user concurrency issue, but there are others. For example, if you set the service up as a singleton (InstanceContextMode.Single) and non-reentrant (ConcurrencyMode.Single) then only one request will ever be processed at a time across all users.
Update: Doing some doco reading:
WCF services aren't enrolled into ASP.Net sessions unless you ask for it (using )
WCF services can on a per service basis opt in, using the [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements] attribute on the service implementation
There doesn't seem to be any way of opting in but not opting into Session state.
There's a good blog post about this on Wenlong Dong's site
So from what I can see you should be able to use AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.NotAllowed to opt out individual services completely from ASP.Net services. Alternatively, leave it off by default and only opt-in the ones that need access to the ASP.Net session (bearing in mind that unless you really need to share the same session with ASP.Net, just using WCF's session services is probably a better bet).
Related
I understand that in order for a ASP.Net handler to support session state you need to implement both IHttpHandler and IRequireSessionState, but why isn't session state provided by default? If for performance reasons, then wouldn't it be better to have an interface like IDoesNotRequireSessionState?
Its because the session is block the asynchronous operations, and the handle is usually used for long time operations, like the making and download of a file - if you keep the session on long time operation you block the rest of your pages.
Also the handle is made with the idea of the minimum required to get a response.
About the session lock:
Web app blocked while processing another web app on sharing same session
jQuery Ajax calls to web service seem to be synchronous
ASP.NET Server does not process pages asynchronously
Replacing ASP.Net's session entirely
If for performance reasons, then wouldn't it be better to have an
interface like IDoesNotRequireSessionState?
Absolutely not, because then everybody implementing a handler must know about the existence of this interface. An HTTP handler is the fastest in terms of performance you might ever get from ASP.NET. So if you want to pollute it with crap like session then you'd better do it explicitly, and taking full responsibility of doing so, by implementing some interface that you should know about.
I'm having problems because of a poorly written third-party library which our system heavily depends on. This library is not thread-safe (because of some bugs and static variables) and I need to use it in a ASP.NET webservice, which handles each user request in a separate thread.
I've tried many solutions for this problem. The best solution for now is, in my opinion, let subprocesses handle the requests. One subprocess will listen and handle the requests for one user, so I can synchronize access to the library code in a per user fashion, which is much better than all that I can do when sharing static variables between requests.
How can I route requests received by IPC communication to the appropriate WebMethods without reinventing the wheel? If possible, I would like to use the classes from .Net that handle this in a normal ASP.NET webservice, but I'm having a hard time trying to find their names.
TL;DR: I have a class MyWebService (that inherits from System.Web.Services.WebService) with some methods marked with WebMethodAttribute and I want to pass a made-up HttpRequest (or HttpContext) to it and tell it "handle it like you're receiving this from a real HTTP server, despite the fact the current process is a console application".
First, you may want to consider using WCF instead of ASMX, which is a legacy technology, kept only for backwards compatibility.
Second, you have another option: ensure that only a single thread ever uses the third-party libarary at a time. Placing lock blocks around all access to the third-party library may solve the problem.
The intent is to create a set of web services that people can reuse. These services mostly interact with a backend DB creating, retreiving and processing data.
We want to expose services so that people can use to create data mashups and other applications.
End users are webpages that can be within our domain or outside our domain. For pages outside the domain we plan to release widgets that would be configured to retreive and display the data.
One requirement - application should be extremely scalable in terms of the number of users it can handle.
Our code base is .net and we are looking at ASPX webmethods (or ASHX), ASMX webmethods and WCF (starting to read up on WCF).
In terms of security/access I found that maintaining sessionid, memberships is doable in all three. WCF seems a bit complicated to setup. I could not immediately see the value of asmx when we can get all done just using a webmethod in aspx (with a little tweaking).
Also, assuming that with the ASP.NET MVC2 I might be able to get clean urls as well for these webmethods.
Questions
Which one will be the most effective in terms of performance and scalability?
Any reason why I should choose WCF or ASMX?
Thank you for taking the time to read through this post and apologies for the naive questions since I am new to .net.
EDIT I kind of understand that WCF is the way to go. Just to understand the evolution of the technologies it would be good if someone can throw light on why a aspx webmethod is different from an asmx when similar things (apart from discovery) can be accomplished by both. The aspx webmethods can be made to return data in other formats (plaintext, json). Also, it seems that we can build restful services using ashx. Apologies again for the naive questions.
You should use WCF for developing webservices in .Net. WCF is highly configurable with many options for security, transport protocols, serialization, extensions etc. Raw performance is also significantly higher. Also WCF is being actively developed and many new features being added in version 3.5 and 4. There are also variations like WCF data services and WCF RIA services. WCF 4.0 also has better REST and JSON support which you can directly use in ASP.Net / JQuery.
ASMX is considered deprecated technology and replaced by WCF. So if you are going to start new development which requires exposing reusable services, WCF is the way to go.
I am not necessarily disagreeing with previous answer. But, from a different perspective, WFC is tricky to configure. It requires bindings, endpoints, packet sizes, a lot of confussing parameters, etc in your configuration files, and there are many serialization/deserialization issues reported. Also WCF is a relatively new technology (therefore still exposed to bugs and patches needed).
The client-generated [Reference.cs] files might have unwanted interfaces, and each public property client class exposed in the WSDL gets generated with the same observer pattern that LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework uses ( OnChanged, OnChanging, etc) so this adds a lot of fat to the client code, as opposed to the traditional SOAP Web client way.
My recommendation, if you aren't using Remoting over TCP or if you don't need the 2-way notification mechanism for remote changes - all these are very cool features of WCF - you don't need to use it.
I'm working on a new website, written in VB.Net using ASP.NET MVC2, there is a need to call "legacy" VB6 code for various complex bits of business logic. The VB6 is a framework consisting of many dlls and is very stateful, we are pretty much emulating how the framework is used in our client application, ie the application runs (lots of state setup), a user logs on (even more state) and then loads a file (even more state).
I've been provided with a "web service interface framework" to get this up and running for use in the web app, this "web framework" hides the legacy code behind a thin layer running under IIS. The idea being that thread pooling provided by IIS will reduce memory use etc etc. I can't help but believe that the guy who provided this has missed the point, since each instance is so stateful there is no way that a thread pool can work, since once a user logs on using one particular object from the pool, no other object will be capable of servicing that client (since it wont have the state)! Also, adding a web service interface and associated SOAP marshalling is a huge overhead compared to calling the objects directly.
The only way I can think of doing this is either a single legacy interface instance which is used by all clients and blocked by each call until it completes, or a thread per client with each legacy interface object being created in a new thread and living for the life of the client.
None of these is ideal but with the amount of code in question and the prolonged migration programme to .net (2+ years and still stateful) I can't think of an alternative. We run the original client app in a citrix environment for some customers so I expect that it could also run ok with thread per client given a beefy enough server and that the overheads of the framework itself should be lower than when the client app is involved.
Any ideas??
I suggest that you take a look at this framework Visual WebGui. I am an employee with this company and therefore wouldn’t sound objective but I believe Visual WebGui had solved some of the major issues with scaling statefull applications and turning single user environment into multi user environment. Worth a look.
Here's an option but it won't be pretty.
It sounds like you need to associate a long lived object (the stateful object to your backend tier) with individual users.
You could store this object in Application state and associate it with the users Session state with a key. You'd need to provide a wrapper to keep track of them all. When the session dies you could capture the event and destroy the backend object.
Application state is a key/value store just like Session. You can access through HttpContext.Application
The big downfall to this is that the objects you put in there stick around until you destroy them so your wrapper and session destroying code need to be spot on. Other than that this might be a quick way to get up and running.
Like I said, it won't be optimal, but it'll probably work.
More info on implications:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bf9xhdz4(VS.71).aspx
EDIT:
You could also make this work in a web farm environment. Store the information needed to recreate your stateful legacy object in Session state which can be shared between the machines using the built in SQL Provider. If a user bounces to a server where the object doesn't exist your Application state wrapper can just recreate it from the Session state info.
This just leaves how to clean up the stateful object on servers where it isn't needed. In your retrieval wrapper update a hashtable or something with the access time each time the given stateful object is accessed. Have a periodic cleanup routine in th wrapper detroy the stateful objects that haven't been accessed since a little more than the session timeout value of your web app.
I've been a longtime ASP.NET developer in the web forms model, and am using a new project as an opportunity to get my feet wet with ASP.NET MVC.
The application will need an API so that a group of other apps can communicate with it. I've always built API's out just using a standard web service prior to this.
As a sidenote, I'm a little hesitant to plunge headfirst into the REST style of creating API's, for this particular instance at least. This application will likely need a concept of API versioning, and I think that the REST approach, where the API is essentially scattered across all the controllers of the site, is a little cumbersome in that regard. (But I'm not completely opposed to it if there is a good answer to the potential versioning potential requirement.)
So, what say ye, Stack Overflow denizens?
I'd agree with Kilhoffer. Try using a "Facade" wrapper class that inherits from an "IFacade". In your Facade class put your code to consume your web service. In this way your controllers will simply make calls to the Facade. The plus side of this being that you can swap a "DummyFacade" that implements the same IFacade interface in that doesn't actually talk to the web service and just returns static content. Lets you actually do some unit testing without hitting the service. Basically the same idea as the Repository pattern.
I would still recommend a service layer that can serve client side consumers or server side consumers. Possibly even returning data in a variety of formats, depending on the consuming caller.