Ideas sought on sending large files over webservices

[Stephen Ahn]

Hello,

We need to send files in the order of 5 to 20 Megabytes (eg. word documents)
via webservices using donet 1.1.
The clients could have slow links using 56K dial up modems.
I've seen some articles suggesting the use of WSE and DIME attachments (for
dotnet 1.1), and WSE.
There's also MTOM, but we would like to stay with dotnet 1.1 for now.

Someone has also suggested Windows' BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer
Service).
Has anyone here tried using BITS with their webservice for this sort of
thing ?

Any ideas appreciated.

TIA,
Stephen

 

[Chris Arnold]

Hi Stephan,

DIME would do the job - but you have an extra overhead of WSE to deal with
if it's not currently part of your design.

You could, quite easily, develop your own 'chunk' model to send multiple,
fixed-length byte arrays read from a BinaryReader; then 're-compiled' at the
server.

I would avoid BITS like to proverbial plague! We literally spent weeks
attempting to implement a solutions using MS's new baby. If you are
distributing to corporate clients who (like most) turn off Windows automatic
updates it will fail. More fundamentally, however, is its complete lack of
any method to deal with authenticating proxy servers!!! When BITS works it
is, indeed, very fast but, like I said 'avoid until MS get it working'!

Have you considered FTPing the data? The only 2 disadvantages I can see to
this are 1. has your client opened the correct port? and 2. you would have
to send the login and password details unencrypted (even if the resultant
connection were encrypted).

Hope this helps

Chris

 

[Stephen Ahn]

Chris,

Thanks for your response.
Could you tell me which version of BITS you tried out ?

Thanks,
Stephen