Using Adapter Development Wizard

After WCF LOB Adapter SDK is installed on the system, the Adapter Developer can use the WCF LOB Adapter Development Wizard within Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to create skeleton code for a new adapter. To invoke the wizard, select File > New > Project > Visual C# > WCF LOB Adapter. This will bring up a dialog box that will guide the user through a few pages and generate a bunch of classes. At a high level, the user need to provide the following information –

1) Provide scheme, project namespace and service namespace

Scheme	Represents the URI scheme for the transport protocol in use on the adapter binding. For example – WCF NetTcpBinding uses “net.tcp” and WSHttpBinding uses “http” as the scheme.
Project Namespace	Generated adapter classes are defined within this project namespace. For example – Microsoft.WCF.Samples.AdapterSDK
Service Namespace	Depicts the namespace for the WSDL generated by the adapter metadata retrieval classes. For example – myadapter://Microsoft.WCF.Samples.AdapterSDK.

 

2) Select message exchange patterns supported by the adapter

Synchronous Outbound	Support one-way send or request/response message exchange pattern
Asynchronous Outbound	Asynchronous flavor of Outbound message exchange pattern
Synchronous Inbound	Support one-way receive or reply message exchange pattern
Asynchronous Inbound	Asynchronous flavor or Inbound message exchange pattern (not supported in ASDK Beta 2)

 

3) Select metadata browsing and harvesting patterns supported by the adapter

Metadata Browse	Allow browsing of the existing system metadata where some meaningful categorization is possible. For more detail, see this post.
Metadata Search	Allow searching of the metadata in systems where unfiltered metadata is too large. For more detail, see this post.
Metadata Retrieval	Allow retrieval of a WSDL/Service Contract from selected metadata after a browse and/or a search function. For more detail, see this post.

 

4) Specify adapter properties

The properties defined on this page are exposed as WCF Binding Properties and can be set programmatically or application configuration files in WCF client.  

See this post for information on how to surface adapter settings as adapter binding properties.

5) Specify connection properties

The properties defined on this page are used within the Connection Uri String used to connect to the target LOB system. These properties can be configured at design time using Add Adapter Service Reference Visual Studio Plug-In/Consume Adapter Service BizTalk Project Add-In > Configure > Uri Properties. At run-time these properties can be set within the Uri used to build the service endpoint address.

The following figure graphically shows high level functionality buckets within an adapter.

If we were to create an adapter called MyLegacyAdapter for an existing legacy application, the following diagram shows the components that an Developer Developer is expected to provide implementation for.

The following table provides high level description of the classes generated by the Adapter Code Generation Wizard.

		<system.serviceModel>     <extensions>       <bindingExtensions>         <add name="MyLegacyAdapterBinding" type="MyLegacyAdapterBindingCollectionElement,{Assembly}" />       </bindingExtensions>     </extensions>   </system.serviceModel>
		<system.serviceModel>     <extensions>       <bindingElementExtensions>         <add name="MyLegacyAdapterBindingElement" type="MyLegacyAdapterBindingElementExtension, {Assembly}" />       </bindingElementExtensions>     </extensions>   </system.serviceModel>

 

Once you have these classes generated, get started with implemening connectivity, metadata handlers (browse/search/resolver) and message exchange handlers (inbound, outbount, asynch inbound, asynch outbound). The adapter developer can also provide support for transactions and reliable messaging using the standard .NET framework as long as the target system has equivalent support. At minimum, the Adapter Developer needs to implement the following:

• Connection
• Connection Uri
• Metadata Browse Handler
• Metadata Resolver Handler
• Outbound Handler

Enjoy developing your adapter. Let your clients use the same adapter using standard WCF service-oriented interfaces in variety of applications - Windows Console Application, Windows Forms Application, BizTalk Application Server, ASP.NET Web Applications, Windows Workflow Foundations, etc.  If a client doesn't supprt WCF (e.g. non windows application or clients where .NET 3.0 is not installed and configured), the consumer-driven contracts/proxy generated from the adapter can be published as a Web Service for consumpton by these clients. Widen the reach of your adapters!!!

Using Adapter Development Wizard.docx

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2007
  After WCF LOB Adapter SDK is installed on the system, the Adapter Developer can use the WCF LOB Adapter

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2007
  Most databases and LOB applications provide some form of metadata that can be used to define the data

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2007
  In this post, I will show how WCF LOB Adapter SDK relates to WCF Service Model and WCF Channel Model.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2007
  In this post, I will show how WCF LOB Adapter SDK relates to WCF Service Model and WCF Channel Model.

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2007
  Many large enterprises have disparate systems including legacy mainframe, packaged and homegrown applications

• Anonymous
  July 08, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 09, 2007
  In this post, I will show how WCF LOB Adapter SDK relates to WCF Service Model and WCF Channel Model.

• Anonymous
  July 09, 2007
  In this post, I will show how WCF LOB Adapter SDK relates to WCF Service Model and WCF Channel Model

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2007
  We are pleased to announce the release of WCF LOB Adapter SDK. Here are some of the related links: WCF

• Anonymous
  September 12, 2007
  very impressive - WCF Semantics and the Biztalk Adapter Service; I always hoped that microsoft would more fully integrate biztalk with the net system