CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wcf
Faraaz
Faraaz

Reputation: 137

How to a structure a WCF Project

I am going to write a WCF service and need help in structuring the project for the below scenario:

  1. Client and Service are going to share data contracts assembly-> http://code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=0809101

  2. WCF is in turn gonna call multiple services to populate data contract using Automapper.

What are the best practices to structure a WCF project? and how to best wire-up automapper in the middle of WCF project?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 5718

Answers (1)

marc_s
marc_s

Reputation: 754983

I like to structure my WCF solutions like this:

  • Contracts (class library)

    Contains all the service, operations, fault, and data contracts. Can be shared between server and client in a pure .NET-to-.NET scenario

  • Service implementation (class library)

    Contains the code to implement the services, and any support/helper methods needed to achieve this. Nothing else.

  • Service host(s) (optional - can be Winforms, Console App, NT Service)

    Contains service host(s) for debugging/testing, or possibly also for production.

This basically gives me the server-side of things.

On the client side:

  • Client proxies (class library)

    I like to package my client proxies into a separate class library, so that they can be reused by multiple actual client apps. This can be done using svcutil or "Add Service Reference" and manually tweaking the resulting horrible app.config's, or by doing manual implementation of client proxies (when sharing the contracts assembly) using ClientBase<T> or ChannelFactory<T> constructs.

  • 1-n actual clients (any type of app)

    Will typically only reference the client proxies assembly, or maybe the contracts assembly, too, if it's being shared. This can be ASP.NET, WPF, Winforms, console app, other services - you name it.

That way; I have a nice and clean layout, I use it consistently over and over again, and I really think this has made my code cleaner and easier to maintain.

This was inspired by Miguel Castro's Extreme WCF screen cast on DotNet Rocks TV with Carl Franklin - highly recommended screen cast !

Upvotes: 11

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