We will continue the more practical part of this series by showing how the new mobile architecture looks in code, and if you want some background, please see the previous parts:
- Part 1 was a general introduction
- Part 2 talked about the changes in the lower tiers (logic + data, LINQ2SQL)
- Part 3 discussed the changes in communication (WCF)
- Part 4 covered important stuff in the user interface (MVC)
- Part 5 summarized the theory and outlined the new architecture
- Part 6 started the walkthrough of the architecture code by looking at the business domain
- Part 7 continued the code walkthrough with a look at the service (WCF)
The implemented architecture is published on CodePlex in a project called Windows Mobile Architecture Blueprint, and this means that you can access the full source code as well as discuss it, come with suggested improvements, etc. As I walk you through the creation of the architecture, we suggest you keep the source code handy to check out more details.
We are now ready to consume the WCF service that we created in the previous post, and therefore we have added a new "Smart Device Project" and selected to create a Device application targeting Windows Mobile 6 Standard (a.k.a Smartphone) and the latest .NET Compact Framework (3.5).
As the tools support is not yet in place in Visual Studio, to consume a WCF service, you need to first download and install the Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5. The tool that you are after is named NetCFSvcUtil.exe, and you use it like this...
...and in the source code you can find a batch file (CreateServiceClient.bat) that will run this command (note that you may have to change the path to the NetCFSvcUtil utility depending on whether you're running on 32- or 64-bit). Note that the WCF service must be running when you run this command, and the out of running this batch file looks something like this...
...with the result that two files are generated (Service.cs and CFClientBase.cs). As there files are already part of the source code, they will simply be replaced and the procedure with running the batch file is the next best thing to what you would expect from integrated support in Visual Studio.
Now, with these two files in place, we can start consuming the WCF service with code like this...
ServiceClient.EndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress("http://192.168.0.100:5610/Service.svc/basic");
ServiceClient service = new ServiceClient();
Category[] categories = service.GetCategories();
...and the first thing we do is to set an endpoint of the service that the mobile device can reach (in this case an IP address). Then the service proxy (ServiceClient) is instantiated and used to retrieve the list of categories. Note that the business entity (Category) that was declared back in the business domain (automatically generated by LINQ2SQL, and automatically serialized by WCF) is readily available on the mobile client (thanks to the proxy we generated above).
In future posts, we will cover more parts of the architecture blueprint implementation.
In some projects, we have used a very simple and straightforward implementation by our former fellow MVP, Alex Yakhnin (he's now employed by Microsoft), that he published as a small blog series last fall (see part 1 and part 2).
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