I have one very weird question.
There are 2 Silverlight Client
1. Admin
2. User
Now, I want a scenario wherein the Admin Silverlight can initiate a function call on the User Silverlight.
Pretty much a newbie with SL so wonder if that would be possible.
I'd appreciate any help.
Thanks
I suppose the applications are not in the same browser / machine, and when you describe the usage pattern as admin and user, I take that there are probably more users than admins.
You might want to take a look at duplex bindings for WCF services - this is a web service binding that allows pushing notifications to clients from the server. When all clients establish such a channel, you can implement hub-and-spoke communication between clients.
This blog post gives a good receipt for getting started:
http://silverlightforbusiness.net/2009/06/23/pushing-data-from-the-server-to-silverlight-3-using-a-duplex-wcf-service/
If they are both in the same frame/browser, you could call JavaScript in the first using the HtmlPage API, which could interact with the second.
So:
Silverlight control -> injects JS into HtmlPage -> JS interacts with Silverlight control 2 (assuming this is possible, please correct me if wrong) -> Silverlight control responds.
If they are in separate windows or running "out of browser", I would expect it wouldn't work.
If the 2 instances are seperated (i.e., the admin is on one machine and the user is on another) there's no direct way to do it. However, you can rig it up with a publisher/subscriber style system.
Assumption: You have some sort of shared data store between the two, maybe a database or something.
Idea: You have the admin client write a request to this shared data store; an entry in a table, or a new file in a network share, or something. You have the user client app regularly scan this table/share for new entries, say every .5 seconds or so. When it sees the entry, it executes the requested operation, storing any return values back to the shared store. When the admin sees the return value, he knows the operation has been successfully executed.
There are a couple of options that I can think of.
You could implement some sort of remote procedure call via web services whereby one Silverlight app posts a request to call the method, and the other Silverlight regularly checks for method call requests.
If hosted on the same HTML page in a browser, you could use javascript to allow the two controls to interact.
However, direct communication between two Silverlight instances isn't supported, and while the suggestions may help to achieve something close to what you want, they don't provide a complete solution that will work in all scenarios.
Related
I have a WPF app that will show youtube videos on my tv via a media center pc. This app will receive commands to PlayVideo(string VideoId), PauseVideo(), etc via a WCF service hosted inside the WPF app.
This is a newbie question, but why can my MainWindow not implement the service contract and then be used as the service using the new ServiceHost() constructor that takes an object singleton in?
When I try I get this exception:
System.InvalidOperationException: Service 'Desktop.MainWindow' has zero application (non-infrastructure) endpoints. This might be because no configuration file was found for your application, or because no service element matching the service name could be found in the configuration file, or because no endpoints were defined in the service element.
My reasoning for doing this is that the simple commands needs to end up at the window anyway, so why not just have the window receive the messages directly instead of indirectly via subscribing to events on the service or having the service have a reference to the MainWindow and call methods on it.
The error, System.InvalidOperationException: Service 'Desktop.MainWindow' has zero application , simply means your app.config (if you have one) does not have the endpoints or the A,B,C's setup correctly (address, binding, contract).
You can host a wcf service in a winform or wpf form, you would only want to do that maybe for a test project in some kind of proof of concept work but never in an application you plan to give to a client or a real user.
If you're new to WPF I strongly recommend reading up on the Model-view-view-Model design pattern. This will allow you to implement the WCF service abstracted away from the UI in your WPF app and will give you a better separation of concerns and responsibilities for the logic in your app.
If you were writing code that others were going to maintain then I'd say...
Why not? Because you're mixing areas of responsibility. The Main Window doesn't need to know anything about WCF, it's job is to present things on screen.
Given that it's your app for your own personal needs, nobody cares what structure you use (just don't ask someone else to maintain it!) :) Having said that, if you want to make it easy for yourself to modify, I'd suggest making an effort to keep the code clean. What you're aiming to do, in my view, doesn't fit that description.
Your mainwindow probably could implement that Service Contract, but I think it's a very bad idea.
How would I go about implementing a feedback function on a windows phone 7 app? I've considered creating a form that sends an email with the data to an address I own, but I wonder if there is a better solution.
I personally think the simplest and best solution is to use EmailComposeTask to send the feedback via email.
You could either just put some questions/suggested text in the Body - or you could fill the Body in with some information from a SL form.
One of the advantages of the EmailComposeTask is you will definitely get their email address to reply to. Another advantage is that the feedback will work even when there isn't currently a network connection - it'll just get added to the outbox for later processing.
Well, I would create a webservice that can receive that data. It could be useful in case you have a backend system that can make some data statistics.
You can refer to that post that contains some code about data sending to a web service: WP7 app never exits BeginGetResponse and goes into the callback function
Regards.
The scenario:
I have a PRISM application developed in Silverlight (4), and I'm using a ASP.NET server side application to host several web-services (which, in turn, accesses WCF-services, but that's not really important here). The Silverlight application must be able to call the web services cross-domain (meaning that the web services isn't necessarily on the same server hosting the silverlight application).
The Silverlight application consists of several modules, each accessing the ASP.NET web-services.
I do not have much experience with Silverlight and PRISM, but as far as I can see, this is not a very unusual scenario...
The problem:
My challange is, that when 2 different modules access the web-services, I get 2 new sessions on the web-server. I would have thought that since both modules live on the same HTML-page (and then also in the same browser session), they would get the same session on the web-server...?
I have tried to make the web-service Proxy-client globally available in the container (using Unity), by registering an instance (using Container.RegisterInstance), and then getting this instance whenever a module needs to make a web-service call (using Container.Resolve), but this doesn't seem to help.
However, any calls made within the same module always gets the same session on the server.
Can anyone see what I'm missing here...?
Thanks!
Jon
Looks like I found my own answer.
The problem was that my application was firing multiple web-service calls upon startup (the different PRISM-modules working independently). And when several calls were made before any responses was given from the web-server, no session (and hence no "ASP.NET_SessionId" cookie was provided) back to the client before subsequent calls were made.
My solution was to make sure I make one call (async as always), for example to a simple Ping-like web-service, then hold all other calls to the web-server until this response is back. Then, all subsequent calls are given the same Session on the server (because now they all contain the "ASP.NET_SessionId" cookie in the header).
In pratice, this call is made by the PRISM-shell, and no modules are beeing loaded before I receive the reponse. Then I'm absolutely sure that none of the other modules get trigger-happy before I have a session-state on hand.
Still, if anybody sees any other problems with this solution, I'm more than happy to hear from you.
Thanks!
Jon
In ASP.NET, I usually log exceptions at server-side, In windows forms I can either log exceptions server-side or write to a log file on the client. Silverlight seems to fit somewhere in between.
I wanted to know what everyone else is doing to handle their Silverlight exceptions and I was curious if any best practices have emerged for this yet.
For real logging that you could store & track, you will need to do it on the server, since you can't be guaranteed anything on the client will be persisted.
I would suggest exposing a "LogEvent(..)" method on a server side web service (maybe you already have one) which would then do the same kind of logging you do in ASP.net
Here's a video about basic web service calls in Silverlight if you haven't done that yet
http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=66723
I'm not sure about any logging best practices though, my first guess would be to do the best practicies for logging in a web sevice on the server and expose that to the client.
Hope this helps!
I would say that Silverlight fits much better to ASP.NET side of the model. You have server which serves web page. An object (Silverlight app) on the page pings data service to fetch data and display it.
All data access happens on the server side and it does not matter if data is used to create ASP.NET pages on the server or sent raw to the RIA for display. I do log any failures in data service on server side (event log works fine) and do not allow any exception to pass to WCF. When client does not receive expected data (it gets null collection or something similar), it display generic data access error to the user. We may need to extend that soon to pass a bit more information (distinguishing between access denied/missing database/infrastructure failure/internal error/etc), but we do not plan to pass exception error messages to the client.
As for client side, sometimes we may get in situation where async call times out -- it is just another message. For general exceptions from client code (typically, bugs in our code), I just pass exception to the browser to display in same manner as any script exception.
Also take a look at the new Silverlight Integration Pack for Enterprise Library from Microsoft patterns & practices. It provides support for logging exceptions to isolated storage or remote services and is configurable via policies in external config or programmatically. Batch logging and automatic retry (in case of occasionally connected scenarios) are also supported.
Use the Isolated Storage available for Silverlight application. You should store here your log.
Then you can develop a mecanism to send the user log to a webservice like the Windows bug report service.
It very much depends on the type of application that youre developing.
if its an mvc / mvp based architecture then your model, or most of it at least, will be on the server, and this is where most of your exceptions will be thrown i would imagine, so you can log them there and choose to display a message to the user or not.
for exceptions from the client you may want to know the details so just send them back.
I'm working on building a Silverlight application whereas we want to be able to have a client hit a url like:
http://{client}.domain.com/
and login, where the {client} part is their business name. so for example, google's would be:
http://google.domain.com/
What I was wondering was if anyone has been able, in silverlight, to be able to use this subdomain model to make decisions on the call to the web server so that you can switch to a specific database to run a query? Unfortunately, it's something that is quite necessary for the project, as we are trying to make it easy for their employees to get their company specific information for our software.
Wouldn't it work to put the service on a specific subdomain itself, such as wcf.example.com, and then setup a cross domain policy file on the service to allow it to access it?
As long as this would work you could just load the silverlight in the proper subdomain and then pass that subdomain to your service and let it do its thing.
Some examples of this below:
Silverlight Cross Domain Services
Silverlight Cross Domain Policy Helpers
On the server side you can check the HTTP 1.1 Host header to see how the user came to your server and do the necessary customization based on that.
I think you cannot do this with Silverlight alone, I know you cannot do this without problems with Javascript, Ajax etc. . That is because a sub domain is - for security reasons - treated otherwise than a sub-page by the browsers.
What about the following idea: Insert a rewrite rule to your web server software. So if http://google.domain.com is called, the web server itself rewrites the URL to something like http://www.domain.com/google/ (or better: http://www.domain.com/customers/google/). Would that help?
Georgi:
That would help if it would be static, but alas, it's going to all be dynamic. My hope was to have 1x deployment for the application, and to use the http://google.domain.com/ idea to switch to the correct database for the user. I recall doing this once when we built an asp.net website, using the domain context to figure out what skin to use, etc.
Ates: Can you explain more about what you are saying... sounds like you are close to what I am trying to come up with. Have you seen such a tutorial for this?
The only other way I have come up with to make this work is to have a metabase that when the user logs in, it will switch them to the appropriate database as required... was just thinking as well that telling Client x to hit:
http://ClientX.domain.com/ would have been sweeter than saying to hit http://www.domain.com/ and login. It seemed as if they were to hit their name, and to show it personalized for them right from the login screen would have been much more appealing for the client base.
#Richard B: No, I can't think of any such tutorial that I've seen before. I'll try to be more verbose.
The server-side approach in more detail:
Direct *.example.com to the same IP in your DNS settings.
The backend app that handles login checks the Host HTTP header (e.g. the "HTTP_HOST" server variable in some platforms). That would contain the exact subdomain.example.com that the client used for reaching your server. Extract the subdomain part and continue...
There can also be a client-side-only approach. I don't know much about Silverlight but I'm assuming that you should be able to interface Silverlight with JavaScript. You could read document.location with JavaScript and pass it to your Silverlight applet, whereon further data fetching etc. logic would rely on the subdomain that was passed in by JavaScript.
#Ates:
That is what we did when we wrote the ASP.Net system... we pushed a slew of *.example.com hosts against the web server, and handled using the HTTP headers. The hold-up comes when dealing with WCF pushing the info between the client and the server... it can only exist in one domain...
So, for example, when you have {client}.example.com and {sandbox}.example.com, the WCF service can't be registered to both. It also cannot be registered to just *.example.com or example.com, so that's where the catch 22 is coming in at. everything else I have the prior knowledge of handling.
I recall a method by which an application can "spoof" another domain name in certain instances. I take it in this case, I would need to do such a configuration? Much to research yet I believe.