Implementing a Web Service Server in Windows CE 2013

Question

I have a smart device (Windows CE 2013) that just got the requirement to be controlled from a number of different devices, to do this, we decided to serve a web page from the device that allows it to be controlled.

I've also read that compact framework doesn't support ASP.NET so I'm intending to serve a static webpage that contains a javascript application that calls web services hosted on the device.

I also found this link explaining how to serve a SOAP Service in C++, but it seems old, and I'd prefer to do this in C# as it's my preffered language and I already have some code on it

I'm not quite happy with this solution, am I missing something? Can't I really do this in C#?

Answer 1

You could try this library for .NET https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack .

It is a free in case if you are using branch v3 form a github.

Answer 2

There's nothing built-in in the CF that provides web server capability. Windows CE has always shipped with an HTTPD server, but, honestly, it sucks and can't be integrated with managed code anyway.

We solved this problem long ago by creating our own IIS-like web server implementation (available commercially). You could do something similar as well - it's just a lot of Socket work. That trivializes the complexity of concurrent request handling and providing an IIS-like object model, but you get the idea. Basically you have to write the whole thing.

Answer 3

The main answer to this is to use Mongoose (or the MIT-licenced equivalent Civetweb). They are C webservers designed for just your task - an embedded web server.

They are really easy to implement, 1 C source file added to your project, give it an array of options, and you're done. See the examples. It has plenty of features and is fast, and small (40kb compiled!). They say it takes 5 minutes to get going with it, and they're right - I tend to use it to add webserver functionality for normal applications now.