Web services, handling server events on the client

Question

Hi all,

Had a look over SO but I can't see any threads which address my problem.

I have a conceptual architecture, where there is a central server, which allows clients to connect to it via XML web services. There are 2 types of client, producers and consumers.

The system is built in C# using WCF WebServices, specifically IIS webservices (though this can be changed if necessary)

Producers publish information to the server, and consumers consume information uploaded by a producer.

The conundrum... Consumers need to somehow subscribe to an event on the server, which is thrown when a producer updates the web server, downloading new content and displaying it if necessary.

I don't want to use a polling mechanism, but can't see a way to subsribe to server events in a client.

Very basic architecture... Workstations could be the same PC running 2 services, or they could be 2 separate PC's on different networks. They don't about each other, so all comms are done through the webservice.

This application is for a messaging network, based on radio paging.

Answer 1

Check out this Pub/Sub messaging implementation by the master himself. Depending on what type of WCF binding you can use, it might be helpful to you.