Using WCF Service in Windows Phone 8.1

This exception occurs because in the previous article we have only one Endpoint configuration for the WCFRestDemo service returns JSON (use webHttpBinding binding) so it's not valid here. We need to add another Endpoint that uses a basicHttpBinding binding to return data as SOAP/XML to use in this case. Open the web.config file in the project Tungnt.NET.WCFRestDemo and edit as in the following:
The last step is to right-click WCFDemo Service Reference and update the service.



Finally press F5 to run and now everything works like a charm.





Very simple and easy to implement, isn't it?

Using WCF Service on Windows Phone 8.1 App Store / Universal App

We have just connected and used the WCF Service from Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight app, everything is easy to implement because Visual Studio supports all for you. But with Windows Phone 8.1 App Store/Universal App with core Windows Runtime, things become more complicated because it no longer supports using the Add Service Reference and directly calls the WCF function again. We need to build and call the WCF REST Service manually by the construction of HTTP GET/POST messages.

This approach is relatively new to those who have long been using the Add Service Reference method above. In my opinion itn seems that Microsoft has not completed this API yet because Windows 8.1 still supports the Add Service Reference method but Windows Phone 8.1 does not. Everything might change when Windows 10 release but for now the only way we have is using the method said above. Let's get started.

Step 1: Add another Windows Phone 8.1 App Store project to the WCFRESTDemo solution as shown below:



Step 2: Design the application interface similar to Windows Phone Silverlight apps but change the App name to "App Store Tungnt.net WP8.1".


Step 3: Similarly we handle two button's click event handler to call the WCF Service function. We will use the HttpClient, HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage classes (in the System.Net.Http namespace) to send and receive data by REST.

I will create a common function to call the WCF REST Service named WCFRESTServiceCall. Note: URI is the URL of WCFRestDemo service + function name like PostMessage or GetMessage.
We've built a Windows Phone 8.1 application to WCF REST Service, please press F5 to run the test and everything will work fine.





Conclusion

In this article we explored how to use a WCF Service in a Windows Phone application. This article showed step-by-step how to use a WCF Service in two types of applications: Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight and Windows Phone 8.1 App Store. Each way has pros and cons so you should consider using them in your application for your fit.

• Add Service Reference is easy to implement but it cannot be used for Windows Phone 8.1 App Store and performance not good as using WCF REST Service returns JSON.
• Create GET/POST message and use HttpClient, HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage to call a WCF Service is harder to implement and you need to write more code but has support by the Windows Phone 8.1 App Store and better performance using JSON.

Hopefully this article has helped you when building Windows Phone applications to use a cloud server to store data.

If you have any questions or experience then please share in the comments below the article and if you find it useful, please share it with your friends.

Happy coding. Stay tuned.