I have created a c++ ATL web service in visual studio 2005. I want to have detailed logs for my web service as what request come or weather any exception happened during the Database call.
I am hosting my web service through IIS. I know that IIS create a log file if logging is enabled But i want to have some more control over those logs in terms of format.
Is there any method to use IIS system itself to implement our own logs inside that log file or
Should I implement a multithreaded logging system which will push logs to a text file.
Thanks
If you want logging beyond what IIS offers natively, you will either have to implement your own logger or make use of any of dozens of loggers already out there.
One that a lot of people love is Peantheios: http://www.pantheios.org/
There are many out there.
The simple answer to your question, though, is that IIS does not have built-in facilities for logging beyond what you see in the GUI.
Related
I'm a semi-experienced developer but a total noob to writing web apps. My question is: would it be possible to have a web app perform some sort of task while it is not opened by any user? For my purposes, I want it to send out text messages to users based on provided phone numbers, but this task must perform when the app is not opened by the user. At a high level, how exactly would I go about doing this? Thanks.
At a high level: The web server on which the application is being hosted will need to run, regardless of user activity. Therefore, it is plausible to also run either a service or scheduled job from this server, or to host a separate application that runs at a fixed interval. That is the high level answer at least :)
The short answer is no, and yes. Depends on your definition of "web server".
If you're talking about the service (e.g. Apache) then no. If you're just talking about the server that your web server is on then yes.
Basically you will need a companion app that runs as a service on the parent OS. It can be written in a language of your choice. The key is in getting your web app and companion app communicating.
The simplest way is to have your web app and companion app use a shared database like MySQL or Mongo. If you need real time communication between your app's users and the companion app you may want to investigate using a messaging service like RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ.
It should be easily possible, but it depends on your environment.
As Example:
When using Java/[Tomcat/Jetty/or whatever] you could create an Servlet which is automatically loaded when your "App" is being loaded.
You can put your "tasks-code" into this servlets init-Method.
Edit:
in web.xml you can configure, which of your servlets should be automatically loaded.
I am looking for any information on the Microsoft TFS Web Services. First I know accessing the Microsoft TFS Web Services directly is not supported and Microsoft provides no documentation for doing this. Therefore I am not expecting any Microsoft support or assistance here.
I know all about the .Net API available for TFS which only works on Microsoft Operating Systems. I have used these many times on Windows, however I need to do non-Windows work to access TFS, I cannot use .Net and I cannot use a Proxy (or "shim") to be installed on a Windows computer to provide Web Services for the .Net API.
I know Teamprise reversed engineered the web services and they successfully used this knowledge to make a very good cross platform Team Explorer and command line implementation in Java to access TFS. So good in fact they were purchased by Microsoft and the product rebranded and rereleased as Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere.
I have also tested the .Net API against Mono on several non-windows platforms and they are not compatible. The initial NTLMv2 authentication is using calls not supported by Mono. They appear to be, understandably, making Win32 specific calls for NTLMv2 support.
Therefore before I go to the trouble of reverse engineering them for myself, and dealing with NTLMv2 to do it. I am hoping that there is some hidden or buried information on the web that someone may have documented some portion of the web services for TFS from 2005, 2008 and/or 2010.
Please no comments or posts about how this is not recommended or supported by Microsoft, that I should find a way to use the .Net API, or suggesting the Proxy/Shim is the best solution. I am fully aware of the Microsoft's official stance on this, and what the supported workarounds would be.
I'm not aware of any documentation for the TFS web services, but I can share some tips on calling them.
The NTLM authentication you mention is really a separate layer: you must authenticate to IIS before it lets you call TFS web services. I'm not aware of any Open Source software that will do NTLM auth for you, but TFS 2010 makes it easy to enable "Negotiate" authentication (SPNEGO on Wikipedia, Authentication by using Kerberos Ticket on MSDN). Negotiate supports both NTLM and Kerberos subsystems, and there may be some existing software you can use to drive it using the system's Kerberos libraries (I think curl does it). If you had to build it yourself, it would probably be easier to go the Negotiate-with-Kerberos route.
Once you're authenticated, you can start calling services. Start by pulling down the WSDL for each service (stick a "?wsdl" suffix on each endpoint URI). Hop over to where TFS is installed and explore the web application directory for endpoints. There are several versions of some endpoints for back compat with TFS 2005 and 2008, but usually new versions are not redundant (they add new stuff). You might have a favorite SOAP client library already (there are many for Java), but I can't really recommend any because we wrote our own at Teamprise.
Services like version control, build, and common structure are easy to discover via WSDL. Most the operations have obvious names, but the complex type fields are often super-abbreviated. The best way to figure which methods to call when is to watch the VS TFS client or TEE with Fiddler or Wireshark or some other HTTP inspection program. TFS VC does do things like file uploads/downloads outside the web services (watch a network trace to see the multi-part MIME upload process and be sure you're sending the right values if you implement this).
A note of caution on the work item tracking web service: this one is going to be extremely hard to master. The WIT design involves the client pre-querying the server for large amounts of schema-less metadata, which is saved on the client (but refreshed incrementally as more web service calls are made). This metadata drives all the client side behavior about work items (what fields are in a work item type, the type of a field, which values are allowed in fields, the rules that run when they change, etc.) and it will take a long time and serious study to build the client behavior to bring a work item to life. Once you have a work item, sending it to the server for update via web services is easy.
It's a lot of work, but it's possible to do incrementally, for example, if you only need some VC features. The TEE team is working on making access from other platforms easier. Please contact Martin Woodward (martin.woodward#microsoft.com) if you have any questions or suggestions in this area.
There is a Java version of the TFS SDK that will run on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It is the SDK that Teamprise uses.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/05/16/announcing-a-java-sdk-for-tfs.aspx
Coding directly against the TFS webservices is not supported (even though people have done it). MSFT could break the interface without letting you know in a service pack or other hotfix. Sometimes there aren't other options, but if the Java SDK works for you, I'd try to use that first.
There is good documentation now: https://www.visualstudio.com/integrate/get-started/rest/basics
In the place I work there are some software written in C# and some written in C++ (the most important ones). Some time ago we decided it would be a good idea to track any possible problem in the software, by sending stack trace and exception information over a web service. So I came with a WCF Service, that gets the information and store them on a database and send an automatic e-mail. It worked, we had to secure it through password, it's done, but now I want our other software, the one written in C++, to use this webservice (this software is used both on windows and linux, so we can't just make a call to another software in the user machine).
I've googled about it, and found this tutorial on how to use gSOAP, which so far didn't help me very much (lots of errors, it is not very detailed, and the web.config file is impossible to read). I was wondering if is there any other way to achieve this. In adition, since I'm using authentication on my webservice, it now has a wsHttpBinding (which AFAIK isn't supported by gSOAP).
Can you guys help me out?
Since your WCF service is in C# with .NET, and the only issue is getting the C++ application to be able to talk to it, one way is to follow the advice in REST / SOAP Endpoints for a WCF service and related articles.
Your C# programs continue to have the full SOAP access to your service.
Your C++ programs could do something like this for REST access:
"Browse" to the HTTP GET URL for the service command you wanted.
Then toss (or parse and use) whatever response came back.
It is a pretty minimal change to your WCF service to offer both SOAP and REST.
The REST ability opens your service to JavaScript as well as C++ clients.
You may need to restrict the interface to simple data, or class objects that are easy to parse in C++.
Will the machines running the C++ applications have the .NET Framework installed?
Check out: Create WCF service for unmanaged C++ clients
Is there a way to test a Web Service using VS2010 like it's used to test a web site?
For a web site I can create a set of WebTestRequest objects that emulate the loading and the parsing of a web page from the test and then, implementing the GetRequestEnumerator I can yield results to the load test so that the execution time and payload of any single page could be evaluated by the test runner and published in my test run reports.
I would like to do the same for a test using web service call so that each time I call the web service (there is some logic in calling it, like logging in, getting a security token and pass a proper formatted XML document to the web service method) I can yield the result to my test runner and evaluate it.
Is there a way to do it or do I need to implement a specific class inheriting from the WebTestItem abstract class?
Regards
Massimo
Yes, it is possible to test Web Services using Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.
Here's a couple of useful links:
How to: Create a Web Service test (MSDN)
How to: Web Service Load Testing Using VSTS 2010 (Blog)
As a starting point, you can use a web proxy tool like Fiddler to intercept the HTTP requests made to the Web Services, copy the contents of the SOAP envelopes in the Web Performance Tests and then tweak them accordingly based on the test scenario you want to simulate.
This doesn't quite answer your question as it's a 3rd party tool, but SOAP UI is a great piece of (free) software for load testing web services, whether your own or someone else's. You can run individual requests, or do a bunch of different load tests.
We've used it for one service that uses credentials, so I'm sure it will work fine for your scenario.
OK, this is impossible, but I will try to explain the situation here.
Let's say we have cases, that we need a fast setup of a web server in order to have a simple soap web service running (querying a db and so on).
In VS though, upon debugging a web project, it creates a quick ASP.NET development server without relying on the actuall IIS that might be installed on the PC.
Is there any project that does something like that?
This would be ideal for small projects, where a simple executable would get a server ready to go and would allow web services to be executed right away.
I have looked at some stuff over the net like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163879.aspx and http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2004/05/24/4479.aspx but they seem to be quite outdated and i am not sure how well they work (havent tested them thoroughly)
EDIT: I have build an application like the one you suggest. However, how can i implement HTTP GET/POST requests to the service using this method? I tried using WebGet after my operationcontract but it didnt work. For example, my service is at http://localhost:8080/Service and i would like to use it such as http://localhost:8080/Service/getMethod?x=2.
I believe that the development server used by Visual Studio is based off of the Cassini code base (of which there is a fork here). I also found this article on hosting the asp.net runtime. It was also created a while back (2004), but has been updated since (2008). I think a lot of the core concepts are probably still the same.
Another approach would be a roll-your-own web server using the HttpListener class. This could take some work if you want to use it for hosting asmx type services, but if you were doing RESTful services, it isn't too bad of an option (this is actually how RavenDB works if you are not hosting it under IIS).
A WCF service can be hosted in almost any kind of application, including a Windows Service or a console application. There is no need for a web server at all.
Alright,
i've done it so im posting it here to help anyone who has issues with similar problems.
Create your WCF Service file as usual and then by using ServiceHost (or WebServiceHost) you can easily create a WCF service.
In order to use GET http requests to make it simple to communicate with mobile devices (such as iphone) you can use WebGet above your service methods and make sure you manually add a service endpoint using WebHttpBinding for WebServiceHost or WebHttpBinding with an WebHttpBehavior for ServiceHost.
Then you can call your service methods such as http://localhost:port/webhttpendpointaddress/mymethod?x=2.