WCF / WPF Chat Application

Introduction

For those that have read some of my other CodeProject.com articles, you will probably know that I am not shy about trying out new technologies. One good thing about that is that I generally share what I learn right here and this article is one of the hardest ones I've done, IMHO. This article is about how to create a peer-to-peer chat application using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and also how to make it look nice using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
When I first started reading about WCF, the first place I looked was the MSDN WCF Samples (which I read a lot), but they weren't that great. I also found lots of chat apps based on the MSDN versions, which were no good, as they could not return the list of users within the chat application. I wanted to create a nice WPF styled app with the list of connected chatters.
So I hunted around a bit more and eventually came across a damn fine/brilliant article by Nikola Paljetak, which I have tailored for this article. I have OK'd this with Nikola and the original article content is here. To be honest, the original article was pure brilliance (it should be mentioned that Nikola is a Professor), but it took a while for me to get what was going on, as the code wasn't commented. I have now commented all code, so I think it will still make a very nice discussion/article for those who are new to WCF/WPF. I was totally new to WCF before this article, so if I can do it, so can all of you.
So that's what this article is all about. At the end of the article, I would hope you understand at least some of the key WCF areas and possibly be inspired enough to look at the WPF side of this article, also.

A Note About the Demo App

Before I start bombarding people with the inner mechanisms of the attached WPF/WCF application, shall we have a quick look at the finished product? There are 3 main areas within the attached demo application:
A login screen
Screenshot - SignIn.png A main window, from which the user can choose who to chat with:
Screenshot - Main.png And a window where chatters may openly chat:
Screenshot - Chat.png The application is based on using Visual Studio 2005 with The Visual Studio Designer for WPF installed, or using Expression BLEND and Visual Studio 2005 combination, or Wordpad if you prefer to write stuff in that. Obviously, as it's a WPF/WCF application, you will also need the .NET 3.0 Framework. This application will cover the following concepts:
  • WCF
    • The new service orientated attributes
    • The use of interfaces
    • The use of callbacks
    • Asynchronous delegates
    • Creating the proxy
  • WPF
    • Styles
    • Templates
    • Animations
    • Databinding
    • Multithreading a WPF application
However, this application is not really that orientated to WPF, as that is covered in numerous other WPF articles at The Code Project. The WPF stuff is really just a wrapper around the WCF article, which is the real guts of this article. Although there is some nice WPF stuff going on, just to make the chat application look nicer than an ordinary console application. I will, however, discuss interesting bits of the WPF implementation.



See full detail: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WCF/WCFWPFChat.aspx

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