WCF - Interview Questions Part 3

Jun 30, 2009 Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
  1. Explain transactions in WCF.
    Transactions in WCF allow several components to concurrently participate in an operation. Transactions are a group of operations that are atomic, consistent, isolated and durable. WCF has features that allow distributed transactions. Application config file can be used for setting transaction timeouts.

  2. What are different isolation levels provided in WCF?
    The different isolation levels:

    1. READ UNCOMMITTED: - An uncommitted transaction can be read. This transaction can be rolled back later.

    2. READ COMMITTED :- Will not read data of a transaction that has not been committed yet

    3. REPEATABLE READ: - Locks placed on all data and another transaction cannot read.

    4. SERIALIZABLE:- Does not allow other transactions to insert or update data until the transaction is complete.

  3. Explain transactions in WCF.
    Transactions in WCF allow several components to concurrently participate in an operation. Transactions are a group of operations that are atomic, consistent, isolated and durable. WCF has features that allow distributed transactions. Application config file can be used for setting transaction timeouts.

  4. How do I serialize entities using WCF?
    LINQ to SQL supports serialization as XML via WCF by generating WCF serialization attributes and special serialization specific logic during code-generation. You can turn on this feature in the designer by setting serialization mode to ‘Unidirectional’. Note this is not a general solution for serialization as unidirectional mode may be insufficient for many use cases.

  5. What is End point ?
    Every service must have Address that defines where the service resides, Contract that defines what the service does and a Binding that defines how to communicate with the service. In WCF the relationship between Address, Contract and Binding is called Endpoint.

    The Endpoint is the fusion of Address, Contract and Binding.


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WCF - Interview Questions Part 2

Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
  1. What is address in WCF and how many types of transport schemas are there in WCF?
    Address is a way of letting client know that where a service is located. In WCF, every service is associated with a unique address. This contains the location of the service and transport schemas. WCF supports following transport schemas

    1. HTTP
    2. TCP
    3. Peer network
    4. IPC (Inter-Process Communication over named pipes)
    5. MSMQ

    The sample address for above transport schema may look like

    http://localhost:81
    http://localhost:81/MyService
    net.tcp://localhost:82/MyService
    net.pipe://localhost/MyPipeService
    net.msmq://localhost/private/MyMsMqService
    net.msmq://localhost/MyMsMqService

  2. What is the difference WCF and Web services?
    1. Web services can only be invoked by HTTP. While Service or a WCF component can be invoked by any protocol and any transport type.

    2. Second web services are not flexible. But Services are flexible. If you make a new version of the service then you need to just expose a new end point. So services are agile and which is a very practical approach looking at the current business trends.

  3. How can we host a service on two different protocols on a single server?
    Let’s first understand what this question actually means. Let’s say we have made a service and we want to host this service using HTTP as well as TCP.

    You must be wondering why to ever host services on two different types of protocol. When we host a service it’s consumed by multiple types of client and it’s very much possible that they have there own protocol of communication. A good service has the capability to downgrade or upgrade its protocol according the client who is consuming him.

    Let’s do a small sample in which we will host the ServiceGetCost on TCP and HTTP protocol.

    Once we are done the server side coding its time to see make a client by which we can switch between the protocols and see the results. Below is the code snippet of the client side for multi-protocol hosting

  4. How does WCF work?
    Follows the 'software as a service' model, where all units of functionality are defined as services.

    A WCF Service is a program that exposes a collection of Endpoints. Each Endpoint is a portal (connection) for communication with either clients (applications) or other services.

    Enables greater design flexibility and extensibility of distributed systems architectures.

    A WCF application is represented as a collection of services with multiple entry points for communications.

  5. What are the main components of WCF?

    1.Service: The working logic or offering, implemented using any .Net Language(C#).

    2.Host: The environment where the service is parked. E.g. exe, process, windows service

    3.Endpoints: The way a service is exposed to outside world.

    Following figure shows us all the core components.

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WCF - Interview Questions Part 1

Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
  1. What is WCF?
    Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an SDK for developing and deploying services on Windows. WCF provides a runtime environment for services, enabling you to expose CLR types as services, and to consume other services as CLR types.

    WCF is part of .NET 3.0 and requires .NET 2.0, so it can only run on systems that support it. WCF is Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications with managed code. It extends the .NET Framework to enable developers to build secure and reliable transacted Web services that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments.

    Windows Communication Foundation combines and extends the capabilities of existing Microsoft distributed systems technologies, including Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, Microsoft .NET Remoting, ASMX, and WSE to deliver a unified development experience across multiple axes, including distance (cross-process, cross-machine, cross-subnet, cross-intranet, cross-Internet), topologies (farms, fire-walled, content-routed, dynamic), hosts (ASP.NET, EXE, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Forms, NT Service, COM+), protocols (TCP, HTTP, cross-process, custom), and security models (SAML, Kerberos, X509, username/password, custom).

  2. What is service and client in perspective of data communication?
    A service is a unit of functionality exposed to the world. The client of a service is merely the party consuming the service.

  3. What is endpoint in WCF? or What is three major points in WCF?
    Every service must have Address that defines where the service resides, Contract that defines what the service does and a Binding that defines how to communicate with the service.

    In WCF the relationship between Address, Contract and Binding is called Endpoint. The Endpoint is the fusion of Address, Contract and Binding.

    1. Address : Specifies the location of the service which will be like http://Myserver/MyService.Clients will use this location to communicate with our service.

    2. Contract : Specifies the interface between client and the server.It's a simple interface with some attribute.

    3. Binding : Specifies how the two paries will communicate in term of transport and encoding and protocols.
  4. What is binding and how many types of bindings are there in WCF?
    A binding defines how an endpoint communicates to the world. A binding defines the transport (such as HTTP or TCP) and the encoding being used (such as text or binary).

    A binding can contain binding elements that specify details like the security mechanisms used to secure messages, or the message pattern used by an endpoint.

    WCF supports nine types of bindings.

    1. Basic binding :
      Offered by the BasicHttpBinding class, this is designed to expose a WCF service as a legacy ASMX web service, so that old clients can work with new services. When used by the client, this binding enables new WCF clients to work with old ASMX services.


    2. TCP binding :
      Offered by the NetTcpBinding class, this uses TCP for cross-machine communication on the intranet. It supports a variety of features, including reliability, transactions, and security, and is optimized for WCF-to-WCF communication. As a result, it requires both the client and the service to use WCF.

    3. Peer network binding :
      Offered by the NetPeerTcpBinding class, this uses peer networking as a transport. The peer network-enabled client and services all subscribe to the same grid and broadcast messages to it.

    4. IPC binding :
      Offered by the NetNamedPipeBinding class, this uses named pipes as a transport for same-machine communication. It is the most secure binding since it cannot accept calls from outside the machine and it supports a variety of features similar to the TCP binding.

    5. Web Service (WS) binding :
      Offered by the WSHttpBinding class, this uses HTTP or HTTPS for transport, and is designed to offer a variety of features such as reliability, transactions, and security over the Internet.

    6. Federated WS binding :
      Offered by the WSFederationHttpBinding class, this is a specialization of the WS binding, offering support for federated security.

    7. Duplex WS binding :
      Offered by the WSDualHttpBinding class, this is similar to the WS binding except it also supports bidirectional communication from the service to the client.

    8. MSMQ binding :
      Offered by the NetMsmqBinding class, this uses MSMQ for transport and is designed to offer support for disconnected queued calls.

    9. MSMQ integration binding :
      Offered by the MsmqIntegrationBinding class, this converts WCF messages to and from MSMQ messages, and is designed to interoperate with legacy MSMQ clients.
  5. What is contracts in WCF?
    In WCF, all services expose contracts. The contract is a platform-neutral and standard way of describing what the service does.

    WCF defines four types of contracts.

    1. Service contracts : Describe which operations the client can perform on the service.

    2. Data contracts : Define which data types are passed to and from the service. WCF defines implicit contracts for built-in types such as int and string, but we can easily define explicit opt-in data contracts for custom types.

    3. Fault contracts : Define which errors are raised by the service, and how the service handles and propagates errors to its clients.

    4. Message contracts : Allow the service to interact directly with messages. Message contracts can be typed or untyped, and are useful in interoperability cases and when there is an existing message format we have to comply with.

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WCF Performance: Making your service run 3 times faster

Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
Wisely changing WCF defaults can yield a significant improvement in your service performance. The exact changes need to be made and their exact effect are dependent in the scenario. The example below how to speed up a certain service 3 times faster.

Read more at http://webservices20.blogspot.com/2009/01/wcf-performance-gearing-up-your-service.html

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Java Script : 'toFixed' Math function for number format

Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
<div style="text-align: justify;">We can use 'toFixed()' function in math to format a number upto required decimal places. The value we get is after rounding the number upto the decimal place required. This function is frequently used in java script. </div>

Here is the syntax.
my_val.toFixed(4)

my_val is the variable which stores the number. Here we are formatting the number upto 4 decimal places.

Let us try with some examples with different number values.
var my_val=11.257;
document.write (my_val.toFixed(2)); // output 11.26

var my_val=11.25;
document.write (my_val.toFixed(1)); // output 11.3

var my_val=11.978;
document.write (my_val.toFixed(4)); // output 11.9780

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How to Drop Primary Key Contraint from a Table

Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
First, we will create a table that has primary key. Next, we will drop the primary key successfully using the correct syntax of SQL Server.

CREATE TABLE Table1(
Col1 INT NOT NULL,
Col2 VARCHAR(100)
CONSTRAINT PK_Table1_Col1 PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (
Col1 ASC)
)
GO

Second, try to drop the primary key constraint using following lines.

/* For SQL Server/Oracle/MS ACCESS */
ALTER TABLE Table1
DROP CONSTRAINT PK_Table1_Col1
GO

/* For MySql */
ALTER TABLE Table1
DROP PRIMARY KEY
GO

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Automatic Thumbnail and Read More Function for Blogger

Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
Read more function is used to cut our post on homepage, post will appear fully when we click read more link. It's cut automatically and if we insert image, it appears thumbnail.
This is automatic read more function with thumbnail. We just need to set up our HTML code.

Follow steps:
1. Go to "Layout" click "Edit HTML"

2. Tick on "Expand Widget Templates"

3. Find this code : <data:post.body/>(Using Ctrl + F)

4. Replace with this code below

<script type='text/javascript'>
summary_noimg = 430;
summary_img = 340;
img_thumb_height = 100;
img_thumb_width = 120;
</script>

<script src='http://ankitbajaj151.googlepages.com/readmore.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;item&quot;'>
<div expr:id='&quot;summary&quot; + data:post.id'><data:post.body/>
</div>
<script type='text/javascript' >createSummaryAndThumb(&quot;summary <data:post.id/>&quot;);
</script>

<span class='rmlink' style='float:right'> <a expr:href='data:post.url' >Read more</a> </span>
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'> <data:post.body/> </b:if>

5. Save / Check your blog

Note:
If you need help to install it or to customize it, pls contact here.

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To Create a DropDown List from an ENUM

Jun 29, 2009 Posted by Lara Kannan 0 comments
You have an 'enum' defined as follows:
public enum CompanyAddressType
{
Unknown = 0,
Primary = 1,
Warehouse = 2,
Distribution_Center = 3,
Cross_Dock = 4
}

You want to iterate through the list and put the data into an asp.net dropdownlist.

Here is the simple code:
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!IsPostBack)
{
string[] names = Enum.GetNames(typeof(CompanyAddressType));
var values = (CompanyAddressType[])Enum.GetValues(typeof(CompanyAddressType));
for (int i = 0; i < names.Length; i++)
{
DropDownListCompanyAddressType.Items.Add(
new ListItem(names[i], values.ToString()));
}
}
}

There are probably easier ways to do it, but this works.

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