Some WCF Guidance Fun

One of my victims, Ilias, asked some very cool questions the other day:

1- What do you recommend for authentication : passing username/pwd (in headers), in every every service call, …?

2- When you’re using a WCF hosted workflow, any worry about Scaling? Cause if I host that WCF in IIS and use WAS, I am then eating up the threads of the W3 worker process , right?

3- Any idea from the WCF team if Silverlight is going to start supporting other bindings ? right now it is limited to basicHTTPbinding, which I am sure you would agree is not the favorite of serious SOA apps.

4- Are you are of any tool that can allow some “BIZtalk like” BAM for WCF?

Now I am FAR from a WCF guru so I pinged some folks internally and this is what I got back:

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1) There’s not a way to answer this without analyzing their requirements. If they are communicating within an intranet, they might use Kerberos tokens, or they might use a secure token issuing service. If they are communicating over the internet, then usernametoken might work, but you need to encrypt and protect the token, possibly using a secured transport like SSL. There is some great guidance at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3E02A6C8-128A-47C2-9F39-4082582F3FE1&displaylang=en.

2) They should look into how WF uses threads and what DefaultWorkflowSchedulerService does. SharePoint hosts WF, and it is scalable. To understand this more, they should look at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973808.aspx.

3) What are their scenarios? The teams responsible for this are always interested in hearing more.

4) WF is not a product, it is a framework. BizTalk is a product that provides monitoring capabilities like BAM. You can use BAM over WF or WCF (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb245978.aspx ). If this does not suit your needs, then you can look into the Tracking services capabilities of WF (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163466.aspx) to determine how to display the data you are interested in. There is a sample in the SDK that shows how to provide your own Workflow Tracking Monitor (although this looks more like HAT than BAM). For a deeper dive and info on querying Workflow Tracking services, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264458(vs.80).aspx.

There are also a BAM Tracking extensions in BizTalk 2006 R2 that lets you track workflows and WCF processes into BAM.

Some WCF Guidance Fun

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