In WPF (in code behind) is there a way to detect whether the computer that the client application is running on has access to the internet?
I'm not sure if there is a simple dedicated method / property to check this or whether I would have to try an HttpGet or similar to determine this.
Is there a property or method for this purpose?
-- Lee
It depends on what you consider "access to the internet"
Safest is to add a 'ping' service to the server you wish to connect to and poll that service.
Trying to keep track of the network status is much harder because it is hard to find out whether it is an intranet other type of network.
See this post too
I don't think there's a simple dedicated method or property.
The simplest solution would be to try to connect to your server and then check the error state.
Related
I'm not really sure how to handle the scenario I have in a good code manner.
The basic of the criteria of my work is this:
A WPF application that consumes a WCF service
The service uses per session instancing
The session starts soon after application is started and should live through the application lifetime (with small exceptions)
Some method calls in a session must precede and be finished before others are called
This means I will have to be able to have one instance of a proxy client throughout the whole application. I will also have to be able to handle async calls, so the client won't hang up, but at the same time ensure they are finished.
My technical understanding go WCF is limiting enough to not know if certain scenarios would work as intended. So I'm going to list my uncertainties:
When does a session start and when does it end. Is it based on the creation of clients or could a separate client instance access the same session if the first would go faulted.
What is the best way to handle exceptions through a WCF service
Is ChannelFactory something I should look at to help me put here.
So what I did in the first iteration to try to solve some of these problems.
I used dependency injection to inject the client instance throughout the classes of my WPF application (I'm using MVVM) to ensure the same instance is everywhere.
I made the service reference using the asynchronous generation method to get the Begin and End versions of all methods to ensure the calls would be async
I used the Coroutine (IResult interface) feature of the Caliburn.Micro framework to ensure one async action is finished before the other begins (have no idea if this is a proper usage or if it is a smart move at all).
Problems I still have is of course how to handle a faulted state of the client. I'm assuming right now that I could reinstance the client and either rescue the session or I could actually just set it up again as it was. I now need to reinstance it everyplace I injected it in with the same new instance.
So I though perhaps it would be best to create a ClientManager class that would wrap the Client. That way I could inject this ClientManager and reinstance inside of him if needed. I guess I should expose him outwards to be able to make method calls but it would be great if I could error handle inside him in somehow. I'm just having a hard time testing my methods and I'm never certain it will work properly in integration because I don't understand all of the inner workings of WCF, coroutines and threading.
Is there anyone out there with more experience then me in these matters that could give me a few pointers or at least tell me how WCF works in these situations ( per session ) and what I'm doing wrong and what right.
WCF supports sessions out-of-box, so I would recommend starting with this MSDN article.
At a very high level, first you set SessionMode=SessionMode.Required in your ServiceContract. And then, set the IsInitiating=True and IsTerminating=True properties on your OperationContract's to mark the start and end of each session.
However, note that WCF limits concurrent sessions by default to 16 to prevent DOS attacks, but you can always up the value. Also, you would have realized that the session is valid as long as its host (IIS / Windows Service / other) is not recycled.
On a related note, I have used WCF Durable Services earlier - which are meant to persist the state of your WCF service in a data-store (default is SQL Server). Ofcourse, there is a performance hit here. Suggest reading further to see if this is the right choice for you.
Hope this helps.
How to detect mobile browser wothout using user agent?
Tried to find in net but all found links are abour user agent
It depends on whether you're doing it server-side or client-side. Server-side you're pretty much limited to UserAgent unless you do really custom stuff.
Client-side you could look at libraries like modernizer.js or yepnope.js. They may be using user agent data behind the scenes, not sure.
Of course if the browser has JavaScript disabled you're out of luck with that too.
Simple answer: you can't, at least on the server side.
But, more importantly, why would you want not to use the user agent string?
If you only want to detect whether the browser is mobile or not, I would do this using JavaScript, by simply guessing it given the screen size / resolution of the device.
Hello All,
I would like to know how to handle the exception in the Silverlight
? Since it is the code which runs
at Client side , So if some
exception happens in the client nor related to web service . So should I show
user friendly message and again make a
call to the server and store the exception details there.
Is it the correct approach ? If not
please suggest a better one
Regards,
Phani
The standard seems to be to expose a method in your webservice (such as logEvent(exception ex)) and handle it the same way you would any other .NET error.
The Silverlight Integration Pack for Enterprise Library apparently provides for a lot more support for error logging too, so that may be worth a look, though I haven't used it myself.
I have a GWT app, which is deployed on the app engine. The application is basically an exam simulator. All the exam questions and answers are stored in an XML file on the server. I use JAXB parser to parse the XML file and send a list of objects to the client through GWT RPC.
I noticed that during the transit (server -> client), the entire data is visible in plain text in Firebug. Since the data (exam questions and answers) are my intellectual property (IP) and something that I give lot of value to, I'm concerned that it's very easy to steal that data. Therefore, I'm trying to find ways to do some basic encryption and obfuscate the content when it's being sent over from the server to the client.
After Googling, I came across gwt-crypto project, and within a few minutes, I was able to achieve the exact result that I wanted. The server would encrypt the data, and the client would decrypt it. In Firebug, it would show the data in encrypted format, and not as plain text.
However, I ran into an issue. After implementing encryption/decryption, I noticed that my application would not load inside my company's network, which is obviously protected by a firewall. The application works perfectly from home or even on a 3G network on my phone. Another version of the application, which does not use encryption/decryption works perfectly from within my company's network. I confirmed this by creating 2 exact same versions of the app, with the only difference between a boolean flag, that determines whether encryption/decryption is enabled or disabled.
I have the following questions here:
What is the best way to achieve the result that I want to achieve? Is gwt-crypto a good solution for that? I'm fine with any simple approach to obfuscate the data during transit. It doesn't have to be a sophisticated algorithm.
What could be the possible reason for a GWT app, with encryption/decryption enabled, not working inside a firewall? I'm really clueless on this.
I'll appreciate any help on this issue.
Using SSL is the right way to go.
In your case, given AppEngine SSL limitations, you should load your HTML normally from non-SSL domain and use cross-site RPC to load your data via SSL domain.
Update:
What is the best way to achieve the result that I want to achieve?
If you want to secure the data in transit then the only secure option is SSL/HTTP. Usually it's also the simplest one as it does not require you to change the application code, just server configuration. In your particular case (appengine with private domain), it takes more work as described above.
Is gwt-crypto a good solution for that?
No. gwt-crypto uses a key to encrpt/decrypt the data. You also need a secure way to discribute this key.
I'm fine with any simple approach to obfuscate the data during transit.
Security through obscurity in not security. It's a false sense of security, which is even more dangerous than no security. It's enough that only one of the technically capable students cracks this and soon everybody would do it.
Possible attack would go like this:
Snoop the network, get username/password of user.
Login as that user, have browser load exam data, which is now unencrypted in memory.
Dump the DOM and inspect it for exam questions.
-
What could be the possible reason for a GWT app, with encryption/decryption
enabled, not working inside a firewall?
Use firebug to make sure network connections are identical, except for the encrypted content. Firewalls should not work that deep. Talk to sysadmin about it.
Anybody here has actually implemented any logging strategy when application is running as XBAP ? Any suggestion (as code) as to how to implement a simple strategy base on your experience.
My app in desktop mode actually logs to a log file (rolling log) using integrated asop log4net implementation but in xbap I can't log cause it stores the file in cache (app2.0 or something folder) so I check if browser hosted and dont log since i dont even know if it ever logs...(why same codebase)....if there was a way to push this log to a service like a web service or post error to some endpoint...
My xbap is full trust intranet mode.
I would log to isolated storage and provide a way for users to submit the log back to the server using either a simple PUT/POST with HttpWebRequest or, if you're feeling frisky, via a WCF service.
Keep in mind an XBAP only gets 512k of isolated storage so you may actually want to push those event logs back to the server automatically. Also remember that the XBAP can only speak back to it's origin server, so the service that accepts the log files must run under the same domain.
Here's some quick sample code that shows how to setup a TextWriterTraceListener on top of an IsolatedStorageFileStream at which point you can can just use the standard Trace.Write[XXX] methods to do your logging.
IsolatedStorageFileStream traceFileStream = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("Trace.log", FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);
TraceListener traceListener = new TextWriterTraceListener(traceFileStream);
Trace.Listeners.Add(traceListener);
UPDATE
Here is a revised answer due to the revision you've made to your question with more details.
Since you mention you're using log4net in your desktop app we can build upon that dependency you are already comfortable working with as it is entirely possible to continue to use log4net in the XBAP version as well. Log4net does not come with an implementation that will solve this problem out of the box, but it is possible to write an implementation of a log4net IAppender which communicates with WCF.
I took a look at the implementation the other answerer linked to by Joachim Kerschbaumer (all credit due) and it looks like a solid implementation. My first concern was that, in a sample, someone might be logging back to the service on every event and perhaps synchronously, but the implementation actually has support for queuing up a certain number of events and sending them back to the server in batch form. Also, when it does send to the service, it does so using an async invocation of an Action delegate which means it will execute on a thread pool thread and not block the UI. Therefore I would say that implementation is quite solid.
Here's the steps I would take from here:
Download Joachim's WCF appender implementation
Add his project's to your solution.
Reference the WCFAppender project from your XBAP
Configure log4net to use the WCF appender. Now, there are several settings for this logger so I suggest checking out his sample app's config. The most important ones however are QueueSize and FlushLevel. You should set QueueSize high enough so that, based on how much you actually are logging, you won't be chattering with the WCF service too much. If you're just configuring warnings/errors then you can probably set this to something low. If you're configuring with informational then you want to set this a little higher. As far as FlushLevel you should probably just set this to ERROR as this will just guarantee that no matter how big the queue is at the time an error occurs everything will be flushed at the moment an error is logged.
The sample appears to use LINQ2SQL to log to a custom DB inside of the WCF service. You will need to replace this implementation to log to whatever data source best suits your needs.
Now, Joachim's sample is written in a way that's intended to be very easy for someone to download, run and understand very quickly. I would definitely change a couple things about it if I were putting it into a production solution:
Separate the WCF contracts into a separate library which you can share between the client and the server. This would allow you to stop using a Visual Studio service reference in the WCFAppender library and just reference the same contract library for the data types. Likewise, since the contracts would no longer be in the service itself, you would reference the contract library from the service.
I don't know that wsHttpBinding is really necessary here. It comes with a couple more knobs and switches than one probably needs for something as simple as this. I would probably go with the simpler basicHttpBinding and if you wanted to make sure the log data was encrypted over the wire I would just make sure to use HTTPS.
My approach has been to log to a remote service, keyed by a unique user ID or GUID. The overhead isn't very high with the usual async calls.
You can cache messages locally, too, either in RAM or in isolated storage -- perhaps as a backup in case the network isn't accessible.
Be sure to watch for duplicate events within a certain time window. You don't want to log 1,000 copies of the same Exception over a period of a few seconds.
Also, I like to log more than just errors. You can also log performance data, such as how long certain functions take to execute (particularly out-of-process calls), or more detailed data in response to the user explicitly entering into a "debug and report" mode. Checking for calls that take longer than a certain threshold is also useful to help catch regressions and preempt user complaints.
If you are running your XBAP under partial trust, you are only allowed to write to the IsolatedStorage on the client machine. And it's just 512 KB, which you would probably want to use in a more valuable way (than for logging), like for storing user's preferences.
You are not allowed to do any Remoting stuff as well under partial trust, so you can't use log4net RemotingAppender.
Finally, under partial trust XBAP you have WebPermission to talk to the server of your app origin only. I would recommend using a WCF service, like described in this article. We use similar configuration in my current project and it works fine.
Then, basically, on the WCF server side you can do logging to any place appropriate: file, database, etc. You may also want to keep your log4net logging code and try to use one of the wcf log appenders available on the internets (this or this).