CoreWCF with CSLA 5.5.3 in a .Net 7 project

[oskarjf]

Hi

I'm upgrading a WCF project to CoreWCF and I can see there is currently a implementation of IWcfPortal. That interface doesn't seem to be available in .Net Core. What should I use instead?

/Oskar

[rockfordlhotka]

Microsoft dropped WCF starting with .NET Core and afaik they don't plan to reimplement it in modern .NET.

Fortunately, there's the open-source CoreWCF project, so there's at least some option.

I only have time to focus on things that Microsoft ships as part of .NET. If someone were to contribute an OpenWCF data portal channel I would accept that pull request (though only for CSLA 8 in the current main branch - I'm not adding features to CSLA 5, 6, or 7).

Implementing a data portal channel isn't terribly difficult in CSLA 5 and later. For example, here's the CSLA 5 gRPC channel:

https://github.com/MarimerLLC/csla/tree/v5.x/Source/Csla.Channels.Grpc

Basically there's one file for the client that implements IDataPortalProxy and calls the server. And one file for the server that listens on the chosen transport protocol (WCF), decodes the inbound message, and calls the server-side data portal. I think the current implementation in main is a little simpler than it was in CSLA 5, because now the server-side data portal is injected into the listener.

[rockfordlhotka]

I should also say that a WCF channel for modern CSLA should do exactly what the gRPC and HTTP channels do - use the MobileFormatter to serialize/deserialize the object graph, and pass a binary stream (probably byte[]) through the WCF transport.

Back in the day, when .NET integrated/supported WCF, the WCF channel used DataContractSerializer (really a variant) to do the serialization. Because that's no longer supported as part of .NET, we're no longer making any effort to ensure that any serialization works except for MobileFormatter. To be clear: only MobileFormatter should be assumed to work.

This too should simplify implementation of a new OpenWCF channel, because the contract between client and server is just a byte array.

[rockfordlhotka]

fwiw, there's already a backlog item for an OpenWCF channel 😄 #1183