We did an event a couple of days ago which linked together a few different UI topics, namely;

• ASP.NET Web Forms V2.0
• Windows Forms V2.0 and Smart Client
• "Avalon" Introduction (it was still called "Avalon" when we did the session, now it's called "Windows Presentation Foundation").

and we also dropped in a session about communication between applications based around ASMX Web Services V2.0 and the features in the WSE 3.0 Technical Preview.

For the web services session I built up a simple demo application to show various features of ASMX 2.0 (particularly around custom serialization, generic type support, basic profile compliance and the new interface based development model). Aaron documents all these really well :-)

For WSE 3.0 we showed how we can host ASMX web services over the TCP transport, we also showed how we can use MTOM for binary and we showed the new simplified security policy and (in particular) I used the username over X509 security settings to control access to perform authentication at my service and to get my message some integrity and privacy.

For all of this, I used a simple app that we built up based around being able to send MP3 files from a service back to a client and I had a few people ask me whether they could have the app as we'd built it up on stage and so I'm including it here.

Now, unfortunately, I deleted what I built on Wednesday shortly after building it so I've had to rebuild here but it should be pretty much identical. Two things to note - one is that it's just a sample and so, naturally, don't assume that it's "best practise" or anything like that and the second is that I've not applied the security settings that we used on Wednesday because it'd probably make it too hard to get working on your machine in the first instance. If you want to apply security then drop into the "WSE 3.0 Settings" dialog box in VS 2005 and set up your security policy.

The zip file for download is here: http://mtaulty.com/downloads/MusicClientDemo.zip

What's in the zip file? Firstly, there are 4 Visual Studio 2005 projects;

MusicLibrary - this is my limited little set of managed code that does just enough work to let me read some MP3 file information from a bunch of MP3 files in a single location. There's one important class called Library and you construct that with the place where your music is and then you can ask it to get you various information about those MP3 files that it found.

MusicService - this takes the MusicLibrary and puts a web service "facade" (rather grandiose term for what I actually did) on the front of it. We then hosted this service both over HTTP with ASMX and over TCP with WSE 3.0. This has a hardcoded path in it as to where the music lives - "d:\music" so you'd need to change that.

MusicClient - this is the Windows Forms application. Looks like this;

 

You type in the "location" of your music (e.g. the HTTP URL where the ASMX music service is configured or the TCP URI where the WSE 3.0 service is listening) and then click the "Go" button and it brings down the rest for you - it's very basic!

ConsoleHostForAsmxTcpWithWse - a very simple console application which hosts the MusicService ASMX web service over a TCP transport by using WSE 3.0. By default, this does almost nothing and listens on a hardcoded URI which is soap.tcp://localhost/myMusicService so that would be one of the things to type into the "Location" box on the client if you had that console service running.

The other thing in the zip file is a second ZIP. This is called WebServerVirtualDirectoryFiles.zip. This is the stuff which hosts the exact same MusicService web service over HTTP with IIS/ASP.NET. Essentially, this is just an ASMX file, a config file and the two binaries (MusicLibrary.dll, MusicService.dll) that are needed for the service. On my machine I created a virtual directory in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\demos and I dropped these files into there.

That's it - hopefully it's explanatory enough that you can make use of it should you want to :-) Feel free to mail me if I can help with getting it working.