Strong Name Storage

Introduction

In Adding a Strong Name to a Third-Party Assembly I described how you can add a strong name to a third-party assembly by disassembling that assembly into IL using ILDASM and then re-assemble it with ILASM, specifying a strong name key.

I never really liked that approach. It seemed like using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut: just because we want to add a few bytes (i.e. the strong name) into an assembly, we have to break the entire assembly apart and put it back together again?

It always struck me as odd that the Strong Name Tool (SN.exe) provided no support for adding a strong name signature to a assembly, unless one already existed or the assembly had at least been delayed signed at compilation stage. Is adding a few bytes into the assembly to accommodate the strong name signature really that hard?

So for the last couple of weeks I've been studying both:

• Microsoft Portable Executable and Common Object File Format Specification (Word) and
• Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) Partition II: Metadata Definition and Semantics (Word).

These documents describe the physical structure of .NET assemblies. Using the information contained therein, I've been able to establish just how a strong name is stored within an assembly. It's not pretty.

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Launching a ClickOnce Application

Introduction

If you're anything like the me, you won’t be content with knowing that browsing to http://MyServer/MyVirtualDir/MyApplication.application downloads, installs and launches MyApplication. You'll want to know how this is achieved. This post goes under the covers of ClickOnce to show you how it's done. Well, at least how some of it is done.

As this post makes quite a lot of references to registry entries, I'll use the standard abbreviations HKCU and HKCR to represent the HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hives respectively.

Retrieving the Deployment Manifest

What happens when you browse to http://MyServer/MyVirtualDir/MyApplication.application?

The first thing to realise is that no 'magic' is happening behind the scenes. When you send an HTTP GET request to a web server (Internet Information Services, IIS, for example) the web server will typically react in one of two ways. It will either establish that your request must be forwarded to a component on the server for processing (a 'handler' in IIS terminology) or will establish that the request represents a static file which should simply have its contents returned.

IIS stores details of handlers, and the requests which are forwarded to each handler, in its metabase. Handlers can be defined in terms of a script map (potentially in combination with a managed handler) or a module mapping. For example:

• Requests matching the pattern *.asp are forwarded, via a script map, to the ISAPI module %windir%\system32\inetsrv\asp.dll.
• Requests matching the pattern *.aspx are forwarded, via a script map, to the ISAPI module %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll and to the managed handler System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory.
• Requests matching the pattern *.shtml are forwarded, via a module mapping, to the pre-registered ServerSideIncludeModule module.

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Serialising Enumerations with WCF

Introduction

There are occasions when the exceptions thrown by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) are clear and unambiguous. There are also occassions where they are not. In this post I'll describe a real-world problem which a colleague encountered recently together which the steps which you might reasonably perform to diagnose it.

The problem manifested itself in a System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException being thrown with nothing particularly useful in the Exception message itself.

System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: An error occurred while receiving th
e HTTP response to http://localhost:8731/Design_Time_Addresses/WcfServiceLibrary
/Service1/. This could be due to the service endpoint binding not using the HTTP
 protocol. This could also be due to an HTTP request context being aborted by th
e server (possibly due to the service shutting down). See server logs for more d
etails. ---> System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An u
nexpected error occurred on a receive. ---> System.IO.IOException: Unable to rea
d data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed
 by the remote host. ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An existing connec
tion was forcibly closed by the remote host

Clearly something very bad happened. But the WCF service itself was still up and running, so one of the theories put forward in the message above "possibly due to the service shutting down" can be quickly dismissed. I'm sure it's obvious, but the above message was generated by my mock-up of the problem rather than the original problem itself.

Mock-up of Original Problem

Let me quickly run through the mock-up of the problem which I put together. It consists of three projects: WcfServiceLibrary contains a single WCF service called Service1, WcfConsoleHost provides a host for Service1 in the form of a Console Application, and WcfClient consumes Service1.

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