Monthly Archives: August 2011

WCF RIA gzip compression of response

Posted by on 2011/08/11 2 comments

I was trying to enable gzip compression of my WCF RIA traffic to decrease the amount of data that is send between the client and server and improve performance.

Note: I used Fiddler2 to determine if the responses were actually compressed or not.

There is a lot of Q&A about this topic on the web, but nobody had a straight solution for me. Some posts refered to old versions of IIS or used 3rd party modules.

I was looking for a solution that will work from with IIS7.5 without installing any 3rd party modules.

Here is how I made it work.

Lets first install the necessary modules: the Dynamic and Static Content Compression modules:

How-to enable GZIP compression for normal traffic:
On Windows 7:
“Start->Control Panel->Programs and features” and click on “Turn Windows features on or off”.
Then enable:
“Dynamic Content Compression” and “Static Content Compression” in “Internet Information Services->World Wide Webservices->Performance Features” and press “Ok”.

Now your ‘normal’ HTTP responses are automatically compressed, but your WCF RIA traffic is not.

To enable this we will need to add the mime-type of our WCF RIA traffic to the list of mime-types that need to be compressed. On my system the mime-type for my WCF RIA traffic is application/msbin1. I assume this is the same for everybody.

How-to enable GZIP compression for WCF RIA Services traffic:
Open a command box (cmd.exe)
Navigate to C:\Windows\system32\Inetsrv\ and execute the following command to add the application/msbin1 mime-type to the list of types that needs to be compressed:

appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/httpCompression /+”dynamicTypes.[mimeType=’application/msbin1′,enabled=’True’]” /commit:apphost

This will add an entry into the Windows\System32\Inetsrv\Config\applicationHost.config file.

Now restart your IIS server and compression is enabled for the WCF RIA Services.

Before:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Length: 583
Content-Type: application/msbin1
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:47:10 GMT

After:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/msbin1
Content-Encoding: gzip
Expires: -1
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:48:01 GMT
Content-Length: 336

I hope this post was helpful!

Useful link: http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/httpCompression

WP7: PhoneApplicationService.Current.State made easy

Posted by on 2011/08/03 5 comments

UPDATE 7 NOV 2011: Have a look at this post: WP7: Northern Lights WP7 Toolkit v0.0.1 for the latest version of this code example.

I was reading “Programming Windows Phone 7”, a free Microsoft book (as PDF) from Charles Petzold and came across some code on why and how to access the PhoneApplicationService.Current.State (chapter 6, “Page State” paragraph) and thought about writing the following code to improve the usability.
Hope you like it:

    public class StateManager
    {
        private static PhoneApplicationService appService = PhoneApplicationService.Current;

        public static void Set<T>(string name, T value)
        {
            appService.State[name] = value;
        }

        public static T Get<T>(string name)
        {
            T result = default(T);

            if (appService.State.ContainsKey(name))
            {
                result = (T)appService.State[name];
            }

            return result;
        }
    }

It can then be invoked as follows:

Set a value

StateManager.Set<MyObject>("MyApplicationObject", obj);

Get a value

MyObject obj = StateManager.Get<MyObject>("MyApplicationObject");

Hope you like it.