How to implement SOAP? - c#

I have to implement SOAP via HTTP, using C#.
Do you know any good documents, and sample code to help?

Most probably you won't need to handle the actual SOAP protocol. If you have access to the WSDL document, Visual Studio will automatically build a proxy for your SOAP web service.
After that, you simply access the generated object's members as if it were a local object.
Check this link for an example.

If you're on .NET 3.0 or higher: use WCF - it's the most current, most flexible way to implement SOAP communication.
See the WCF developer center here on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663324.aspx
WCF gives you plenty of options how to send messages to a remote system - be it HTTP or TCP/IP or MSMQ - you got the choice.
Marc

Thanks to google, I have found the following:
http://www.w3schools.com/SOAP/soap_intro.asp - Some background
http://www.w3schools.com/soap/default.asp - Tutorials

Related

Azure Relay for Soap WebServices

I've recently discovered Azure Relay and it seems very powerful. I have a basic project using it now to expose a WCF Windows Service. I've read in the documentation about how it can be used to expose RESTful services, but I'm having trouble understanding if it can be used to expose a SOAP web service. I can't seem to find any examples of that and the closest I can is this post about exposing the WSDL. I have an extremely simple SOAP web service with a single method that takes in 5 strings as arguments. I know WCF Services can be hosted in IIS but my client's requirement is that no firewall ports are opened so here's my actual question:
Is there a way to use a Relay to expose an internal IIS WebService publicly? Is there another method I might have overlooked to get around opening a port in the firewall?
I would be very open to exposing the service I have or rewriting it completely since it's so simple, I'm just not sure what my options are.
You could try to re-implement the service as RESTful service or as a Web API and then use Azure's API Management to expose it to the outer world.
Hope it helps!

Interfacing with a localhost Windows service

I have a server I've written in C#. I need to interface with it so I can reconfigure things, purge caches, disconnect users, view a run console, etc. I can't shut the server down to do any of these things.
The two available options, interface with the server via a Tcp connection or use the Windows conventions (some WCF?).
Which is one more reliable or a "best practice":
Tcp connection and issue requests (only let admin/maintenance requests come from localhost of course) OR
use WCF to somehow access admin/maintenance methods inside the assembly?
Thanks in advance for the nearly always useful feedback.
EDIT: Can anyone offer any alternatives to WCF? The server itself is literally 65kb. It's tiny. And all I'm trying to do now is issue a few admin/maintenance commands to the server. I'm not trying to be the server, it's already done. I just want to interact with from a local host userland application.
EDIT 2: Problem solve: I'm just using a very very small Tcp client to issue requests to my already built out protocol. It's only a couple hundred lines and no bulky overkillish WCF had to be used. WCF just seems like...too too much. That said I need to learn it anyway (and am right now), thanks for the feedback!
I would definitely recommend using WCF. You define your endpoints and the contract, then using binding you configure how the communication is done (TCP, XML SOAP, Named pipes, message queues...).
This technology is pretty convenient: if you want to move for instance from TCP to HTTP SOAP, then you just update your configuration files and it's done; no code to update. Also it's totally interoperable as you can configure WCF to use HTTP (SOAP messages) and consume your services from any language/platform. You'll also find plenty of tutorials and examples on the web.
Here's a nice article about how to host WCF (TCP communication in the example, but you can use something else by modifying the configuration) within a Windows service
You can host a web service inside windows service. It would be TCP of course but without socket level programming on the client.
You can have then a restful interface on top of it. WCF always seemed too heavy to my liking

How to debug soap web services?

If I have a server sitting somewhere that is not returning the correct information to a client that uses async methods to communicate with it, how do I debug this with soap?
I mean, atleast with rest I can just type in a web address inside a browser and see on the screen the xml response. But how is debugging usually done with soap?
Note, my client is c#/wpf and the server is java
Have look at soapUI. I usually use it to develop and debug soap based web services.
As already mentioned soapUI is great tool if you want to test communication manually. If you want to see what exactly happens between your application and the service use Fiddler.

WCF Test Client that allows me to view/edit the request XML

From time to time we need to test why a certain request coming from our MQ to a WCF service failed. I need to be able to debug the service and find out where it went wrong and resolve the issue. The only information i have is the XML request that was sent to the service. Before we moved to WCF i used a custom tool to send the request to my ASMX debug instance but since we moved to WCF I dont seem to have that option. All the clients i have tried only allow you to fill in the fields through a UI and this is not an option when dealing with huge requests.
Is there a free or open source client that will allow me to do this? I have searched and tried loads but none seem to do it.
Alternatively is there a tutorial or article on writing a test client of this kind? Again i have searched but there seems to be a lack of information on WCF clients and a huge amount on the services.
tl;dr; Im looking for a WCF test client that will allow me to paste in an XML request and send it to a WCF service or a tutorial that will start me in the right direction.
Of course it is not free, but one of our teams is using Altova XMLSpy for that purpose and it works fine.
You can also check (Not sure they will allow you to edit SOAP, but have a try):
SoapUI
WCF Storm
Also check Web Service Studio 2.0 I have tried it will allow you to edit requests.
Not sure I totally understand what you're looking for:
to see the MSMQ messages, you should open the MMC snapin for MSMQ administration on your server where the MSMQ queues live - is that what you're looking for?
in order to create and send out arbitrary XML messages, have a look at SoapUI which is available in a free (and already very capable) version, or alternatively look at SoapBits

Trouble with SOAP Web Service

I am trying to use a SOAP Web Service provided by a third party. I am having trouble getting the service to work correctly in .NET 3.5. I have added it as a web reference and all seems to go well. Problem is when I call the service all I get returned is a NULL object. I have worked with the provider and there service appears to be working correctly. He did mention:
"We are using Axis2 Document/Literal and support SOAP 1 and 2."
I am not exactly sure what that means as I am a semi-newbie to using Web Services. Do I need to change some configuration parameters or something in .NET to get this service to work correctly?
From my experience, web service interoperability isn't the magic it claims to be. Especially, between .NET and Java.
Axis2 is a Java web service "engine"
Document/Literal is a style of writing a WSDL that results in a special SOAP appearance
SOAP 1 and 2 (you probably know) the message format and specific versions thereof
all I get returned is a NULL object
Is not much to start with, could you provide more information?
I would recommend, that you try to intercept the exchanged SOAP messages (you can use tcpmon) and check if they are valid. You would probably get an exception if the remote service can't handle your request so I guess your client as some trouble parsing the response. Additionally, you can use soapUI to generate example request to see what a valid request should look like.
Doc/lit (and at least SOAP 1) ought to work with WCF, but I'm not sure how the legacy (pre-.NET 3.0) web service client deals with that.
Did you, in Visual Studio, add a web reference or a service reference? If you added a web reference, you are not using WCF, which may be the reason it's not working. If this is the case, you should delete the web reference and see if adding a service reference instead helps.
It sounds like the proxy that you have generated (via add web reference) is not de-serializing the xml into the type you expect.
As wierob suggests the first thing I would do is trace the messages that you send to the service and the response you receive - that way you can examine the xml you can check that the proxy is creating a suitable request message and see whether the response does contain data that is not being de-serialized into the object you expect
As well as tcpmon you could use fiddler (from microsoft) to trace the traffic or the simplest would be to switch on the message tracing in WCF to log the request and response to files which could then you examined in the service trace viewer tool
With these kind of interoperability issues I find the best thing is to look at the message "on the wire" first - you may then have to tweak the wsdl so that the proxy gets generated correctly or hand craft the proxy yourself
If you post the wsdl and your proxy that might give us a clue as to the issues

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