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In this final section, we will look at implementing a security layer in our WCF service that takes advantage of the DotNetNuke Security services and user roles.  In the previous sections we added a WCF service to our DotNetNuke web site, then we exposed some site data, then we exposed some module functionality. We also built some clients that could take advantage of the service to provide some monitoring and offline moderation.  When providing sensitive data, or the ability to change data on your site through a WCF service, security should be an important part of your implementation.

In this section of the “DotNetNuke and WCF” series, we will use the WCF service methods we built in Part #6 to do some offline data management.  We defined a couple of OperationContracts to enable offline moderation of Repository module uploads.  Now, we’ll build a desktop application that will monitor our portal for new uploads requiring moderation and allow us to review/approve them from our application without having to browse to our website.

In this section of the “DotNetNuke and WCF” series, I will show how you can use everything you’ve learned to expose some Module “functionality”.  So far, we’ve used WCF to expose some Data about our web site. But hopefully you can see that we are not limited to just exposing data, but that we can also expose module functionality using the same methods.

Ok, so all the groundwork is set. You should now understand how to add a WCF service to your DotNetNuke web site and how to expose both a SOAP-based and REST-based endpoint to your service.  In this section, we’ll talk a little about DataContracts and show you how to expose some data about your DotNetNuke web site to external clients.  We’ll add an OperationContract to expose some Metrics about our site, and write a Windows Forms application that will use the service and allow you to monitor your site’s activity without have to browse to your web site.

In Part#3, we created our WCF Service, defined a ServiceContract, wrote the Implementation code, and finally, a unit test verify that our new Service was working.  Now in this section, we’ll take a look at the Configuration part of the service add a REST endpoint to our service which will allow us to use IE as our test client and make a RESTful call to our DNNService.

OK, so now let’s take a quick look at WCF and talk about the components of a WCF service.

Why would I want to use WCF with DotNetNuke? Well, for the same reason you would have used Web Services in the past, to expose Data and/or Functionality to applications or web sites outside your application boundaries.

So, I just finished up my Workflow session here at OpenForce Vegas, and the feedback I received on it, plus my earlier session on using WCF with DotNetNuke was very encouraging!.  For those of you who were unable to attend either OpenForce Europe or OpenForce North America this year, I thought it would be nice to show you all some love :)