Does managing Endpoints in AppFabric work?

Question

Although I am successfully hosting and managing several services in WAS/AppFabric, I have not been able to manage their endpoints in the IIS Manager. All of my services have an empty list in the "Endpoints" page even though I know there are several active endpoints. 

Is this feature supposed to work in the current beta??

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello there, In the Beta 1 release AppFabric discovers only those endpoints that are explicitly defined in the web.config file for your application. That is, it finds only the ones that live inside the <Service> tag. If you are leveraging the "tagless service" feature of .NET 4, where your web.config file does not have a <Service> tag and the runtime assumes some endpoints, then you will not see those endpoints in the list. Do you have a <Service> tag in your web.config? In AppFabric Beta 2 (due out soon) and beyond you'll see both the explicit endpoints and the ones that are assumed by the runtime. --chris

Answer 2

The problem was with my custom config elements not having a schema as reported (and solved) here:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dublin/thread/b922fbd6-6bab-4391-b3e5-6a57da52b721

So now I see my explicitly defined endpoints, but unfortunately the one piece of "management" available on the endpoints does not work for me. When I try to edit my endpoint address I get an error:

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Configure Endpoint

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The endpoint address is not a valid URI.

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OK   

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I'm thinking this is again because I'm missing some external configuration for IIS as my endpoint use URI's with custom schemes (protocols). For example:

foo.bar://path/to/endpoint

Do I need to register my scheme/protocol in IIS or something?

Thanks!

Shawn

Answer 3

Hi Shawn,

In Beta 1, AppFabric IIS modules and PowerShell cmdlets only accept relative URIs for endpoint addresses. This is a bug and the fix will be included in the Beta 2 release.

As a potential workaround, you can use the IIS Configuration Editor to update the URI (more details at http://www.iis.net/expand/AdministrationPack).

Thanks,


James

Answer 4

Thanks James looking forward to that update.

BTW I was wondering what kinds of other features might be in the pipeline for Endpoint management.

For example, will I ever be able to enable/disable an endpoint from the GUI? Add/remove behaviors etc.

Thanks!

Shawn

Answer 5

Hi Shawn,

In the v1 release of AppFabric the only properties you can change on an endpoint are its address and its performance settings (buffer pool size, maximum buffer size, and maximum received message size). You should use other tools, like the Service Configuration Editor, to change other properties.

We geared AppFabric tools to support an IT Pro experience, not a Developer experience. We don't expect IT Pros to change things like bindings in an a production environment. This is a fuzzy area, though. We have some customers whose administrators never touch those settings and some that do.

Thanks,
chris