Dutton's blog

The app I'm currently working on is a graphical client which connects to a server for its data. This connection is made using WCF and configured within my app.config file like this:

I now need to allow the client to connect to different servers at the request of the user, so I can add these to my app.config as additional endpoint elements, like this:

The problem is, how can I access these configuration elements in code to populate a pull-down or something to let the user pick? The usual ConfigurationManager I'd use to access stuff from my app.config doesn't provide any of the ServiceModel elements so instead I had to first get the Configuration object for the application using ConfigurationManager then get to the service model section using ServiceModelSectionGroup's GetSectionGroup method, like this:

var appConfig = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
var serviceModel = ServiceModelSectionGroup.GetSectionGroup(appConfig);
var clientEndpoints = serviceModel.Client.Endpoints;
foreach (ChannelEndpointElement endpoint in clientEndpoints)
{
  Debug.WriteLine(endpoint.Address);
}

It appears that my web host, site5, has experienced some issues today, so apologies for anyone getting 404 or database errors when visiting.

I've been assured it's back to normal now.

I have a Prism application which uses a Unity DI container to load a bunch of modules which represent various elements of my application.

I recently needed to perform some clean-up in one of my modules when the application exits. Normally this is something I would do with an IDisposable implementation, but in a Prism/Unity setup Dispose never gets hit on the module code.

Here's how I got around it:

First I created a custom Event to allow me to signal my modules that the container is closing:

public class ApplicationExitEvent : CompositePresentationEvent<string> { }

Then in my bootstrapper I implement IDisposable and fire the event in my Dispose() method:

public void Dispose()
{
  var eventAggregator = Container.Resolve<IEventAggregator>();
  if (eventAggregator != null)
  {
    eventAggregator.GetEvent<ApplicationExitEvent>().Publish("");
  }
}

Then in my module's Initialize() method I subscribe to this event:

EventAggregator.GetEvent<ApplicationExitEvent>().Subscribe((o) => Dispose(), true);

And put whatever cleanup code I need in my module's Dispose method. Done!