Windows Mobile 6.5 and WCF/MSMQ

[MrNorth]

Hi guys!

I am currently int he design process of a SOA application where one of the devices will be a windows mobile 6.5 standard device. As far as I know, you are limited to using basicHttpBinding whn using WM 6.5 + SOA, is this correct?

From the device you are able to perform say 20 different business functions, some are allowed to resend when the device loose connection, some are NOT allowed to resend and should be discarded. How do you suggest I implement this? What would be the most robust design for such a behaviour?

I have done some reading and I think I can use MSMQ on the WM 6.5 but not in combination with WCF. So for transactions that can be resent, one path could me to use MSMQ libraries and for the other transactions, use WCF + basicHttpBinding.

What do you think? The design should be as robust as possible.

My thoughts are to implement an "MessageDispatcher" that examines the message which should have a boolean or enum that indicate if it can be resent or just fire and forget. The it calls a DispatcherFactory and get either an MSMQDispatcher or a WCFDispatcher that takes care of the actual message delivery. Good or bad?

kind regards
Henrik

[MrNorth]

Hi guys!

Well, maybe the question was not as specific as it hsould have been. We have slowly started working on this app, starting with the background service that is intended to run on the phone itself. Now the first issue has occured, winmobile 6.5 doesn't seem to support regular windows services.

Which is the best way to create an app that is running in the background, sending information every 5 minutes to a wcf service? I need to see some kind of service info, like if the service is started etc.

What options do I have?

kind regards
Henrik

[petevick]

Hi,
you can run a 'console' app that runs on startup.

That way it will remain invisible to your users. Just use Sub Main as a startup point, and don't let it exit, and it will run all the time your device is on.

Alternately, start and stop it with your application

HTH

Pete

[MrNorth]

Hi!

Thanks for this info! In your opinion what is the best way to get status info from such a console app, should I write it to a text file or use some kind of tracelistener? This is my first windows forms app, I have been working primarily with winforms and asp.net .

I guess the best way to handle that the console app never terminates unexpected is to make sure that all exceptions are handled at top level if I get a socket error or I/O error.

If I launch a console app in a separate app domain, how do I do a graceful termination when the user shuts down the application?

Also this background service send information about lots of things (wifi coverage, login times, number of barcodes scanned, battery life etc etc) and we must make sure the average user can't close it in a simple manner, how can we prevent this?

/Henrik

[petevick]

Hi,
to get status - write it to a text file - yes, or that is what I would do.

To start from your app you could do a process.start and in sub main do a while loop - possibly look for the presence of a file Stop.txt, and while it isn't there, carry on processing, else stop.

If you do it as a module with sub main, the user wouldn't see it, unless they ran a 3rd party task manager

Pete