ASP.Net Questions

Before in my VB app I would just load the icons from DLL. How can I load the icons provided by .NET dynamically?

By using System.Drawing.SystemIcons class' for example System.Drawing.SystemIcons.Warning produces an Icon with a warning sign in it.

What,s typical about a Windows process in regards to memory allocation?

Each process is allocated its own block of available RAM space' no process can access another process' code or data. If the process crashes' it dies alone without taking the entire OS or a bunch of other applications down.

What are the various ways of hosting a WCF service?

There are three major ways to host a WCF service:

Self hosting the service in his own application domain. This we have already covered in the first section. The service comes in to existence when you create the object of ServiceHost class and the service closes when you call the Close of the ServiceHost class.
Host in application domain or process provided by IIS Server.
Host in Application domain and process provided by WAS (Windows Activation Service) Server.

what are the advantages of hosting WCF Services in IIS as compared to self hosting?

There are two main advantages of using IIS over self hosting:
Automatic activation
IIS provides automatic activation that means the service is not necessary to be running in advance. When any message is received by the service it then launches and fulfills the request. But in case of self hosting the service should always be running.
Process recycling
If IIS finds that a service is not healthy that means if it has memory leaks etc, IIS recycles the process. Ok let us try to understand what is recycling in IIS process. For every browser instance a worker process is spawned and the request is serviced. When the browser disconnects the worker process stops and you loose all information. IIS also restarts the worker process. By default the worker process is recycled at around 120 minutes. So why does IIS recycle. By restarting the worker process it ensures any bad code or memory leak do not cause issue to the whole system.
In case of self hosting both the above features you will need to code yourself. Lot of work right!!. That's why IIS is the best option for hosting services until you are really doing something custom.
Below figure shows where the recycle option is located in IIS. You need to click on the DefaultAppool and then Properties.

What is the difference WCF and Web services?

Web services can only be invoked by HTTP. While Service or a WCF component can be invoked by any protocol and any transport type. Second web services are not flexible. But Services are flexible. If you make a new version of the service then you need to just expose a new end point. So services are agile and which is a very practical approach looking at the current business trends.

How can we host a service on two different protocols on a single server?

Let’s first understand what this question actually means. Let’s say we have made a service and we want to host this service using HTTP as well as TCP. You must be wondering why to ever host services on two different types of protocol. When we host a service it’s consumed by multiple types of client and it’s very much possible that they have there own protocol of communication. A good service has the capability to downgrade or upgrade its protocol according the client who is consuming him.
Let’s do a small sample in which we will host the ServiceGetCost on TCP and HTTP protocol.

Once we are done the server side coding its time to see make a client by which we can switch between the protocols and see the results. Below is the code snippet of the client side for multi-protocol hosting

What is three major points in WCF?

1) Address --- Specifies the location of the service which will be like http://Myserver/MyService.Clients will use this location to communicate with our service.

2)Contract --- Specifies the interface between client and the server.It's a simple interface with some attribute.

3)Binding --- Specifies how the two paries will communicate in term of transport and encoding and protocols.

What is WCF?

Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named "Indigo") is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture.

Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications with managed code. It extends the .NET Framework to enable developers to build secure and reliable transacted Web services that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. Windows Communication Foundation combines and extends the capabilities of existing Microsoft distributed systems technologies, including Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, Microsoft .NET Remoting, ASMX, and WSE to deliver a unified development experience across multiple axes, including distance (cross-process, cross-machine, cross-subnet, cross-intranet, cross-Internet), topologies (farms, fire-walled, content-routed, dynamic), hosts (ASP.NET, EXE, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Forms, NT Service, COM+), protocols (TCP, HTTP, cross-process, custom), and security models (SAML, Kerberos, X509, username/password, custom).