A co-worker just reminded me that I promised to discuss the effects a home network could have on your Indigo Service, and how that could differ based on the transport you are using.

The first thing to realize about a home network is that your computer is likely behind a NAT. Most DSL or Cable routers will act in this role. The router is assigned an IP Address from your service provider via DHCP, and therefore your router is the only member of your network that is globally addressable. Which means that while you can connect to other machines on the internet, they cannot connect to you.

The practical upshot of this situation is that you cannot use the “dual” standard bindings (a.k.a. WsProfileDualHttpBinding and NetProfileDualTcpBinding) to access services located outside of your home network. Which won’t affect you unless you are using a duplex service contract. I can already hear you saying “but duplex contracts are incredibly useful!” Yes they are. And if you want to use them from behind a NAT you have 2 options:

1. Use NetProfileTcpBinding. This will allow you to be the client for duplex communication with another Indigo endpoint.
2. Host a router service on the Internet. This is a complicated solution that entails bridging the TCP connection from your home machine to a dual HTTP connection with the service. I call out HTTP specifically, because the only scenario where NetProfileTcpBinding will prove insufficient is if your service is a non-Indigo service and needs to be contacted through HTTP. I will try to comment further on this solution in a future post.

The second thing to note is that your network may not be configured with DNS. Which means that even though machines within your network are all addressable, you may need to identify them by their IP Address. To do this, simply use your machine’s IP Address where you would normally use a hostname (for a Service’s URL or a Proxy’s remote endpoint).

And now back to our (somewhat) regularly scheduled Channels/layering tutorial…

Indigo is constructed with layering as a central design principle. This means that in essence Indigo is actually a collection of sub-frameworks, each of which can be supplemented by ISV code (or replaced completely for that matter). Each framework is defined by two things:

1. Fundamental unit(s) of data
2. Transformations that can be applied to said data

Which (as you might be thinking) is another way of saying an object is defined by its members and its methods. This is true, but it’s more difficult (but very important) to stay focused on consistent pivots when constructing clean frameworks.

Indigo is built around the concept of a Message object. The structure of a Message object loosely represents a SOAP envelope, and consists of two distinct parts: the message’s body and an extensible collection of headers. The body is application-defined data, and headers are added/processed by infrastructure (and can also be used by the application). Access to a header or the body is achieved through XmlReader, as it contains structured data. It is this structured primitive which is the core of Indigo’s power (and which departs from the classic networking primitive of a byte array). It allows for extensible, interoperable protocols to be built, and for data contracts to be established.

At a high level, Indigo consists of two larger frameworks: the Typed Layer, and the Channel Layer.

The fundamental unit of data for the Channel Layer is Message. Channels are used to Send and Receive Messages. Channels come in two forms: Transport Channels and Layered Channels.

Transport Channels perform the actual send/receive of the Message to a network resource, including any necessary serialization.

Layered Channels perform a function based on the Message passed in, and then delegate further modification and transmission to their Inner Channel. So as you can see, even within a layer we have layers 🙂 Some examples of Layered Channels include Protocol Channels that use Message headers and infrastructure Messages to establish a higher-level protocol (such as WS-ReliableMessaging), and Reshaping Channels for changing the Message Exchange Pattern (such as converting an underlying [Send Channel, Receive Channel] pair into a Duplex Channel).

Message is a very flexible object, but to fully utilize it requires knowledge of Infosets and XML. What most developers instead will likely interface with is the Typed Layer. The fundamental unit of data for the Typed Layer is a CLR class. In the Typed Layer you create CLR objects that implement Services and Typed Proxies. The Typed Layer converts parameters and return values into Message objects and method calls into Channel calls. In this way, the Typed Layer builds on the functionality of the Channel Layer, and can transparently leverage any changes/improvements made to Channels.

Next I’ll provide an example to give you a flavor of this layering in action, stay tuned!