What’s new on the Mobile Application Blocks Community Drop (03-31-2009)?

It was two weeks ago, but we have a new community drop on the CodePlex site for the Mobile Application Blocks.

This new community drop includes the return of the Subscription Block as part of the project. It hasn’t been included on the previous drop but it was ported and included now.

The other major change was the integration of great updates from the Microsoft Dynamics Mobile product team. They did several wonderful improvements around the Configuration Block, the Connection Monitor Cell Connection, Subscription Block, Endpoint Catalog and the Disconnected Agent. Those improvements have been integrated in our code base in a TDD approach.

One interesting addition was the IWSCredentialService interface as part of the Disconnected Agent Block. This is a side effect of an new abstraction on the Endpoint Catalog.

The Endpoint Catalog is the responsible to provide information required to access a logical endpoint as the URL address and authentication related data depending on an specified network name. E.g. you may need to consume a web service and for your application this web service can be identified with a logical name such as “ProductsService”. That web service can require different URL addresses and even different credentials for different networks, so if you’re connected to the internet you may need to use:

URL: “http://mycompany.com/services/productsservice/”
Username: joe.mycompany.com
Password: xxxxxx

But if you’re connected to the intranet, you can access it directly using the following information:

URL: “http://services/productsservice/”
Username: joe
Password: xxxxxx

The Endpoint Catalog used to address this issue by providing a catalog with default configuration and specific configuration by network name for a logical endpoint name. This configuration information used to include the address and credentials (username, password and optionally the domain). This information is retrieved from the configuration file, which can be encrypted to keep your data safe.

That approach was good, but it carries on with two issues:

1. We don’t have a clear entry point to inject a service that can ask the user for credentials if needed.

2. We don’t have a way to reuse credentials for several endpoints or networks.

To address both issues, the Dynamics Mobile group has included a new abstraction of the credentials resolution, defining that the endpoint catalog won’t include the authentication details anymore, but only an account name. So, you can now specify that your endpoint configuration from the internet is:

URL: “http://mycompany.com/services/productsservice/”
AccountName: “MyInternetAccount”

And we can point several endpoint configurations to reuse the same account by using the same account name.

At the same time, when we need to inject i.e. the actual credentials into the web service proxy, we can use a Credential Service to resolve this account name to actual credentials.

This is what we’ve included as part of the Disconnected Agent. A new IWSCredentialService and a default implementation that retrieves the credentials for each account name from the configuration file named the ConfigurationCredentialService. With this interface, you have now a good customization point where you can inject your own Credential Service which would ask the user for credentials for a given account name when needed.

I’ll talk later about the Connection Monitor design changes, but in the meantime I invite you to download the drop from http://mobile.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=25565 and take a look at the full list of changes on the wiki Changes from MCSF v1.

I suggest you also take a look at this great introductory post of Kzu regarding the new Container Model block.

Have a nice weekend!