Hi guys I need to have a standard management gui ( look and feel ) and lately I've been looking into mmc. Msdn and other free tutorials provides the installation and simple implementation of a snap in.
I'm confused right now on how I can integrate it with my production applications( console and windows service ). Do I need to set a communication protocol for my snap in and other applications? I'm thinking of doing some classic remoting or via wcf for the communication protocol but not pretty sure if that should be my road map.
What I needed is a sample demo or tutorial that implements a snap-in communicating with a working console application or a windows service. If anyone can give some pointers on how to do it or some real life implementation is very much appreciated.
MMC does not dictate how you talk to your code. It is only the presentation layer. You can do pretty much anything you like (as long as you are well behaved in terms of not blocking the UI thread), you can do network calls, ADSI, RPC, WCF, COM, Win32,....
We using the ironring C# library instead of the mmc3 c# support; it is more stable (and works with older mmc)
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I am currently involved in a simple to medium complex IOT project. The main purpose of our application is gathering data from our devices and analyzing that data as well as calculating statistics.
On the server side we run a MVC application. Up until now we used Hangfire to schedule the calculations. Hangfire is an amazing tool for scheduling emails and other simple stuff, for more advanced things it's too slow. The calculations can take up a lot of time and are processor-intensive (we are trying to optimize them though), so we need to call them in a background task, a simple API call won't be enough.
I thought about splitting the application into multiple parts, the website, the core and a windows service.
The problem is, I never tried that before and I have no idea what the best practice is to achieve that kind of thing. I searched for examples and articles, but all I found were suggestions to use Hangfire and/or Quartz.NET.
Does anyone have any resources on what the best practice is to build a MVC application, a Windows service and how they could communicate (probably through a queue)? What is the best practice in such a situation?
Although there may be many different possible ways to connect a site with a windows service, I'd probably chose one of the following two, based on your statements:
Direct communication
One way of letting your site send data to your backend windows service would be to use WCF. The service would expose an endpoint. For simplicity's sake this could be a basicHttpBinding or a netTcpBinding. The choice should be made based on your specific requirements; if the data is small then basicHttp may be "sufficient".
The advantage of this approach is that there's relatively little overhead needed: You'll just have to setup the windows service (which you'll have to do anyway) and open a port for the WCF binding. The site acts as client, the service as server. There's nothing special with it, just because the client being a MVC site. You can take almost any WCF tutorial as a starting point.
Note that instead of WCF you could use another technology like .NET Remoting or even sockets just as well. Personally, I often use WCF because I'm quite used to it, but this choice is pretty opinion based.
Queued communication
If reliability and integrity is crucial for your project, then using a queue might be a good idea. Again: depending on your needs, there may come diffeent products into consideration. If you don't need much monitoring and out-of-the-box management goodies, then even a very simplistic technology like MSMQ may be sufficient.
If your demands to the aforementioned points are more relevant, then maybe you should look for something else. Just recently I got in touch with Service Bus for Windows Server (SBWS). It's the Azure Service Bus's little brother which can be used on premises locally on your windows server. The nice thing about it is, that it comes at no extra charge as it's already licensed with your windows server licence.
As with the first point: MSMQ and SBWS are just two examples. There may be a lot of other products like NServiceBus, ZeroMQ or others usable, you name it.
I have a smart device (Windows CE 2013) that just got the requirement to be controlled from a number of different devices, to do this, we decided to serve a web page from the device that allows it to be controlled.
I've also read that compact framework doesn't support ASP.NET so I'm intending to serve a static webpage that contains a javascript application that calls web services hosted on the device.
I also found this link explaining how to serve a SOAP Service in C++, but it seems old, and I'd prefer to do this in C# as it's my preffered language and I already have some code on it
I'm not quite happy with this solution, am I missing something? Can't I really do this in C#?
You could try this library for .NET https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack .
It is a free in case if you are using branch v3 form a github.
There's nothing built-in in the CF that provides web server capability. Windows CE has always shipped with an HTTPD server, but, honestly, it sucks and can't be integrated with managed code anyway.
We solved this problem long ago by creating our own IIS-like web server implementation (available commercially). You could do something similar as well - it's just a lot of Socket work. That trivializes the complexity of concurrent request handling and providing an IIS-like object model, but you get the idea. Basically you have to write the whole thing.
The main answer to this is to use Mongoose (or the MIT-licenced equivalent Civetweb). They are C webservers designed for just your task - an embedded web server.
They are really easy to implement, 1 C source file added to your project, give it an array of options, and you're done. See the examples. It has plenty of features and is fast, and small (40kb compiled!). They say it takes 5 minutes to get going with it, and they're right - I tend to use it to add webserver functionality for normal applications now.
I have an old MFC app written in Visual Studio 6. This will at some point be rewritten in C# .NET. However, before then I have to write a couple of new Windows services for the existing application. The others were written in ATL. What I would prefer to do is write these new services in C# .NET so that when the rest of the application is rewritten, these don't need to be.
Is it going to be possible to call the interfaces on the libraries hosted in a .NET windows service from the old application? If so, could you please explain how.
Absolutely. You're looking for a feature of .NET called COM-Interop.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kew41ycz%28v=vs.71%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163494.aspx
The second link has an ATL example.
EDIT:
Based on your feedback in the comments, let me expand on this...
Ah - you're right about the sample on that page.
The first link is really where you want to start for all the details. If you follow the links, you'll find this page:
"Exposing .NET Framework Components to COM"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zsfww439%28v=vs.71%29.aspx
Essentially, it's just a matter of applying a series of attributes to your classes and properties, and then generating the appropriate registry entries on the client machine (which .NET has a tool to do - see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bctyca52%28v=vs.71%29.aspx)
I've done this several times myself for .NET projects people needed to call from VC++ and/or VB6.
Some other links that might be of interest:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/COM/nettocom.aspx <-- Perfect example of what you're trying to do.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/COM/Universal_CCW.aspx
I've done this exact thing with an MFC-based C++ application in Visual Studio 2008 and a .NET-based C# Windows service.
First, if you have not created the C# Windows services yet, I've got a couple of tutorials for creating the basic framework. The first tutorial provides a step-by-step procedure for creating the service and writing events to an application-specific event log. The second tutorial shows how to modify the service to install and uninstall itself from the command line, which I find of great use.
Second, you need to decide how you are going to communicate between your MFC application and your Windows service. Any kind of inter-process communication (IPC) model will work - sockets, pipes, shared memory, WCF, etc. Since you are wanting to migrate to .NET anyway, I would recommend using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is the way I've done it. Specifically, I chose the named pipe aspect of WCF for my communication method based on the chart shown here.
If you go down the WCF route, you'll benefit from the fact that the communication between application and service is .NET-based. Thus, when you move your application to .NET, the communication mechanism won't have to be rewritten. The trick in the meantime is getting your MFC application to use the WCF code. To do this, write the WCF client code in a .NET assembly using C#. Then, use a C++ dll to bridge the gap between your MFC code and the .NET assembly. I've got another tutorial with step-by-step instructions for how to do this.
Hope this helps.
I am still learning .NET framework and I want to implement multi-tier application just for practice. My goal is to make application for hospitals.
Question: Is it good idea to implement multi-threaded server that accepts client requests via sockets -- Worker threads that deal with client requests and then route requests to data access layer?
This would be decent practice for thread management, but is this right way for my application? Is there any other solution to achieve this goal?
I'm thinking of implementing the multi-threaded server in java and client in .net?
Microsoft provides quite a bit of guidance for application architecture using the .NET platform.
I can recommend the Microsoft Architecture resources available here:
MSDN Architecture
Also, the 2nd edition of the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide is available here as a PDF:
MS AAG 2nd Edition
I think that your best option would be to write a WCF service application.
That is hosted in IIS, which does all of the connection and threading things for you, well mostly - you still have to write thread safe code.
Hi I'm a PHP developer and I have some experience with Java. I'm trying to learn C# and my first project would be a program that starts the timer on a PC by clicking a button on another PC in the network. The problem is, I don't know where to start? What do I need to read up on? The OS for both PCs is Windows XP so they're desktop apps. I'd appreciate any help from you C# gurus. I hope my start as a C# programmer would be successful. Thank you!
For the communication channel you should use WCF - here is an article showing how a simple client/server is written.
In terms of a UI for these - you may want to use winforms or WPF. WPF is the future, but winforms are easier to get to grips with. There is a Microsoft website dedicated to both of them.
There are several timer classes in the framework - see this article for comparisons.
If you are using .NET 3+, then WCF is generally the recommended technology. It is basically a merge of .NET remoting, web services, etc. into one library.
Edit: Sorry, my answer was based on Midhat's answer. Oded gave the best guidance since he actually read the question! WCF is only what you would use to communicate from one application to another. In your scenario, you can set up WCF as a TCP/IP server/client.
You need .Net remoting http://www.beansoftware.com/net-tutorials/net-remoting-tutorial.aspx