如何从智能设备应用程序对WCF服务进行异步调用？

Question

I am developing a smart device application, which is going to communicate with a wcf service over wi-fi. As there is no option to add a service reference into a smart device project I decided to use the NetCFSvcUtil.exe. Everything works great!

But...

In the end I understood that the application must interact with the service in the background. Having read this article Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Background Processing Techniques . I decided to use the Asynchronous Web Service Call. There http://msdn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/library/aa347733.aspx I found the /async parameter, but it appeared to not work for the NetCFSvcUtil.exe.

What can I do to get the async proxy for my smart device application? Is there a way to generate it or I'm expected to add async methods to the interface with my own hands? Maybe it would be suitable for .Net CF to use SvcUtil.exe to generate the async proxy in my case?

Answer 1

A further more information like which platform you are using to build your Smart phone application would be helpful.

I have done Blackberry development and consumed web services. There are two ways you could build your web services

1. RestFul Service - Consumption of web services would be pretty easy. Posting data could be a little pain as multipart form data is posted as stream in Wcf - Rest Starter Kit

2. Soap Service - If you decide to use SOAP, then for blackberry and Android you have to use preverified KSOAP -2 to send and receive soap messages between your app and the web service. If you decide to use KSOAP -2 , go back ASMX services. Somehow WCF services does not communicate with KSOAP -2 (due to change in SOAP version or something) where as a simple ASMX service works pretty smoothly. There are dozens of article which you could use to learn how to use KSOAP

he original idea was to host it in a windows service...

Windows Services could never be web facing. If you want any thing to be web facing, you need a Web Server !

Answer 2

In the end it worked. The "Add web reference" tool created a proxy with Begin/End async methods and the proxy interacted with the wcf service hosted by a simple console application (later a windows service) through the URL property of the proxy.