WCF Question

Your have to use your imagination on this one...

User A – Browser based user
User B – Smart Client (Win32) user

User B cranks up an application in the morning and leaves it running, during the day all the time it’s running it is constantly polling the web server to see if anyone has caused an event to occur... If they have then the application comes to live and interacts with User A.

Now I know the polling bit of this is really inefficient, and my question is “Can WCF make it efficient for my win32 application” if so how ?


If the following is possible it would be really nice

User B cranks up the application in the morning, it goes and Waves to the web server, good morning Mr web server, here I am, if you get any requests for me, let me know...

Now user A visits the web server and does something... invoking the web service to then turn around and say ahhh Yeah that win32 application this morning wanted me to notify it when this occurs... ok Mr Win32 here you go have this task....

Sorry for the layman way of stating it, couldn’t think of any other way of saying it.. Apart from

Now I know the polling bit of this is really inefficient, and my question is “Can WCF make it efficient for my win32 application” without having to poll the server...

It depends what you mean by "win32 application" - are you talking about an unmanaged C++ app or is it a .NET application? If it is a .NET app then yes WCF can definitely help (the pattern you describe is known as "publish subscribe" or Pub/Sub) and I've written programs before that do that exact same thing using WCF.

Thanks yep the win32 application is a .net 3.5 app :) i will check out about pub/sub :)

cool, well post back here if you have any specific questions :)