How to connect to a WCF Service with IronPython

Question

Has anyone done this? I've tried generating a c# proxy class and connecting through it, but I cannot figure out how to get IronPython to use the generated app.config file that defines the endpoint. It tries to connect, but I just get an error about no default endpoint. I would ideally like to make the connection using only IronPython code and not use the proxy class, if possible. The binding for the service I am trying to connect to is a NetTcpBinding if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

Is your WCF service interface available in a shared assembly? If so, you could look at using the ChannelFactory to create your client proxy dynamically (instead of using the generated C# proxy). With that method you can supply all the details of the endpoint when you create the ChannelFactory and you won't require any configuration in your .config file.

Answer 2

One way to communicate with a WCF service using Ironpython is:

• Configure your WCF service to have a basichttpbinding
• Communicate with the WCF service using SOAP as if it was a standard web service

For an example of using python with SOAP see:

http://diveintopython.org/soap%5Fweb%5Fservices/index.html

This is probably not exactly what you were looking for, you loose the benefit of NetTcpBinding. This may become easier when VS2010 is released.

Answer 3

See my blog post. There are IronPython WCF service and client examples.

To use app.config, you probably must copy it to ipy.exe and rename it to ipy.exe.config but I have not tried it so I don't know whether it works or not.