• A lot of work
• Spending quality time with my son
• Hacking on different kinds of technology bits (mainly pieces released at the PDC 2008)

I’ve also tried to get a clear picture of my “blind spots” when it comes to WCF. Even though I feel quite competent, there are still tons of stuff that I don’t touch daily so I still have to “rehearse”.

Since I have “Get to know Workflow Foundation – for real” on my TODO list I spent some time playing with durable services.

The persistence provider mechanism that is located in System.WorkflowServices is not exclusive to to Workflows / Workflow services. It can also be used with “vanilla” WCF Services.

The idea is that the framework can persist the service instance after you have invoked a method and when a future method invocation comes down the wire, it can pull it from the persistence store – revive it and pass the call to the “same” instance. A perfect fit for the scenario of long running services.

So how do you enable durable services? It is quite easy. First, you decorate your service implementation with [DurableService] and one of the mechanisms that specifies that the type is serializable (I chose [Serializable] for the sake of simplicity).

In this code snippet we also see that there is another attribute that can be used to tell the persistence mechanism that a call to an operation creates the instance or tears it down; [DurableOperation].

The next thing you have to do is to wire up a persistence provider using either configuration or programmatically.

Out of the box there exists only one Persistence Provider; One suited for persisting the service instances to SQL Server – System.ServiceModel.Persistence.SqlPersistenceProviderFactory. You will have to set up a SQL Server Database instance with the schema located in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\SQL\EN.

But that was a digression – now back to my custom “Velocity” Persistence Provider. If you don’t know what Codename “Velocity” is, I suggest that you head over here and read more about it. The short description:

It is Microsoft’s attempt to create an in-memory, high-performance, distributed caching supporting different scenarios that can suite many needs in both a web farm or other places where caching is needed. The current version that is publicly available is CTP2. We should expect a new CTP in March (around the time of MIX’09) and the RTW/RTM in the mid of 2009.

To implement a custom persistence provider, you will have to create two classes; the persistence provider implementation and its factory. It is the fully qualified type name of the factory that is specified when you set up the configuration.

The following configuration snippet shows how a custom service behavior is set up. You will have to set the behaviorConfiguration attribute on the service element to “defaultServiceBehavior” in this case.

The code for the provider is available here (Licensed under the Apache License 2.0).

Cheers