Most of us who develop in Silverlight run into atleast one issue one time or another. We start a cool new …]]> PROBLEM

Most of us who develop in Silverlight run into atleast one issue one time or another. We start a cool new project, write services, test them, they run – all good! Yay! Then we deploy to production or staging environment and excitement of showing off of our new cool Silverlight application fades away pretty quickly – the dreaded “Service Not Found” error or simply no response to service calls Hello Fiddler!? Where did my services go?

The fix is usually pretty easy if we paid attention to ServiceReferences.Client.Config file and “fixed” or changed the EndPoint addresses to our services , but admit it we all have some level to A.D.D (Attention Deficit Disorder) and among other things we tend to forget this crucial part or change we must do before going live. To remedy this (yep – don’t have a production deployment check list) here is a little technique that I use to solve this problem:

SOLUTION

I typicaly write a Static Helper class, lets say DeploymentEndpoints

 public static class DeploymentEndpoints
 {
        internal static string URIPath
        {
            get
            {
                return
                     HtmlPage.Document.DocumentUri.AbsoluteUri.Substring(0,
                     HtmlPage.Document.DocumentUri.AbsoluteUri.LastIndexOf("/"));
            }
        }

        public static ServiceParams Service1Info
        {
            get
            {
                return
                     new ServiceParams("CustomBinding_Service1",
                            string.Format("{0}/Services/Service1.svc", URIPath));
            }
        }

        public static ServiceParams Service2Info
        {
            get
            {
                return new ServiceParams("CustomBinding_Service2",
                                 string.Format("{0}/Services/Service2.svc", URIPath));
            }
        }
 }

 And a ServiceParams class as:

    public class ServiceParams
    {
        private string _binding;
        private string _endPointAddress;

        public ServiceParams(string binding, string endpointAddress)
        {
            _binding = binding;
            _endPointAddress = endpointAddress;
        }
        public string EndpointAddress
        {
            get { return _endPointAddress; }
            private set { _endPointAddress = value; }
        }
        public string BindingInfo
        {
            get { return _binding; }
            private set { _binding = value; }
        }
    }

The CustomBinding_Service1 and CustomBinding_Service2 configurations in DeploymentEnpoints class are picked from the ServiceReferences.Client.Config file. If you have any special Bindings Configurations setup there, they will apply as usual.

Call the service from your app like this:

        private void CallService1()
        {
            ServiceReference1.Service1Client service1Client =
                 new ServiceReference1.Service1Client
                                          (DeploymentEndpoints.Service1Info.BindingInfo,
                                          DeploymentEndpoints.Service1Info.EndpointAddress);
            service1Client.WhoAmICompleted += (s, e) =>
            {
                if (e.Error == null)
                {
                    textBlock1.Text = e.Result;
                    service1Client = null;
                }
            };
            service1Client.WhoAmIAsync();
        }

And thats it!

Anytime you add a new Service, make sure you include a new Static method (like: public static ServiceParams ServiceXXXInfo…) that points to your new service in the DeploymentEndpoints class, and that you have to do only once! After that you can deploy it to any environment without worrying about changing the endpoint configs at all in ServiceReferences.Client.Config file.

To test it out, change the Specific Port in your Web Projects “Web” Settings section and see how it takes effect seamlessly, or better yet deploy it somewhere else with a different domain name etc.

And here is a simple demo project code that shows it all: WCFDeployment.Web.zip