Hosting Web services on your mobile device - finally a managed way

In a new MSDN article called .NET Compact Framework Mobile Web Server Architecture  the two authors introduce a small Web server for the .NET Compact Framework. So we are finally able to at least host ASMX (-like) Web services on our Pocket PC and similar devices.

Get technical insight on the implementation of Mobile Web Server architecture. Understand use cases, the web server framework and future developments in the architecture.

The most interesting part of the architecture for me is the support of a so called SOAP Module which handles SOAP-based Web services communications in a similar way like ASMX does:

Soap Module
The Soap Module addresses the requirements of processing web service remote invocation by clients. The current implementation supports GET, POST and SOAPAction operations. Typically GET and POST operations are utilized for browser request, returning an XML string to represent the results of operation. SOAPAction is used to identify SOAP packets requested by applications utilizing the particular web service.

Additionally, the SOAP Module provides facilities to automatically generate WSDL files from a requested web service. Therefore, it eliminates the need for developers to manually create the WSDL files confirming to their web service application. A WSDL file is used to define the entry points and contracts as well as describe the service of the application, thus allowing other web services or applications to utilize the web service correctly.

Would be nice they also supported the disabling of automatic WSDL generation - which makes sense in a lot of situations.
Anyway, sweet thingie, definitely want to see it improving ...

Comments

[Christian Weyer]

Testing ...

[Ajay Jha]

Interesting read. I am working on developing a mobile application failure mode catalog. A paper summarizing the reaserch done so far got published at www.pnsqc.org This paper is available at http://www.testingeducation.org/articles/wireless_failure_modes.pdf Currently I am searching for an application to test that utilizes the web services protocol to deliver content and services on a mobile device. Thanks! Ajay

[Andrew Whitten's .NET Blog]

SOAP Services on the PocketPC

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