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DCS Infrastructure Services

  • Article

The DCS application server is hosted inside Internet Information Services and has several components that are known as the infrastructure services. These include two extensions to Windows Work Flow Foundation (WF)—Task Factory and WorkFlowHost—as well as the DCS Developer Toolkit and a set of reporting and management tools.

Windows Work Flow (WF) Extensions

The Task Factory is responsible for choosing the configured implementation of the business logic, whereas the WorkFlowHost is responsible for executing the WF–based workflow logic. To facilitate business logic reuse, DCS provides templates for nested logic and category workflows. These templates can be customized to inherit business processes.

DCS Developer Toolkit

To facilitate rapid application development and to promote best practices, DCS provides Visual Studio extensions and a DCS Developer Toolkit.

The DCS Developer Toolkit lets developers:

  • Use a guidance-based wizard to create services.
  • Create WCF-based messages.
  • Define service contracts.
  • Create both sequential and state workflows.
  • Define services as workflows.
  • Create conversational workflows.
  • Create service stubs from workflows.
  • Deploy services and create proxies from Visual Studio.

Reporting and Management

In addition to the Task Factory and WorkFlowHost, and the DCS Developer Toolkit, the infrastructure services include a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) plug-in for monitoring DCS and for administrative use.