Communication Design Checklist
From Guidance Share
Contents |
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Design Considerations
- Unmanaged code is used for communication across AppDomain boundaries.
- Message-based communication is used when crossing process or physical boundaries.
- Round trips are minimized when accessing remote layers.
- Data types that cross physical boundaries are serializable.
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Message-Based Communication
- Partially connected scenarios are supported by storing messages and sending them, when a connection becomes available.
- Design appropriately handles a scenario when a message response is not received.
- Acknowledgements are used, to force the correct sequencing of messages.
- A synchronous programming model is used, if message response timing is critical for your communication.
- Custom communication channels are used, only if the default channel does not meet your requirement
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Asynchronous and Synchronous Communication
- An asynchronous communication model is used, unless you must guarantee the order in which operations take place, or you use operations that depend on the outcome of previous operations.
- Platform features are used for asynchronous in-process method calls.
- Existing asynchronous calls are wrapped in a component that performs synchronous communication to support synchronous communication.
- Local caches or message queues are used, to store messages for later delivery in case of system or network interruption.
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Coupling and Cohesion
- A message-based technology such as ASMX or WCF is used, when loose coupling is important.
- Standard protocols such as HTTP and SOAP are used, when implementing a loose-coupled web service interface.
- Services and interfaces contain only methods that are closely related in purpose and functional area.
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State Management
- State is only maintained, if it is absolutely necessary.
- State information is stored in durable data stores in a stateful programming model within a component or service.
- If you are designing an ASMX service, the Application Context class is used to preserve state.
- Extensible objects provided by the platform are used when designing a WCF service.
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Message Format
- Binary serialization is used to preserve type fidelity.
- The design can detect and manage messages that arrive more than once (idempotency).
- The design can detect and manage multiple messages that arrive out of order (commutativity).
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Passing Data Through Tiers - Data Formats
- If performance is important, custom objects are used to pass data between tiers and to hand serialization.
- DataSets are used if your application works mainly with sets of data, and needs functionality such as sorting, searching and data binding.
- Scalar values are used if your application works primarily with instance data.
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Interoperability Considerations
- Standard protocols such as SOAP are used enable communication with a wide variety of platforms and devices.
- The design considers the scenario when target systems might be protected by firewalls that block some protocols.
- The design considers scenario when target systems might not understand platform-specific types, or might have different ways of handling and serializing types.
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Performance Considerations
- Chatty interfaces are not used for cross-process and cross-machine communication.
- Façade pattern is used to provide a coarse-grained wrapper for existing chatty interfaces.
- Custom classes are used to implement efficient serialization.
- Network roundtrips are minimized by passing data as a single unit, for example by using the Data Transfer Object pattern.
- The design minimizes the volume of data sent to remote methods.
- XML is only used when you need to pass large amounts of data over the network.