The service tutorials provide an introduction to several features of the service oriented application model provided by the Decentralized Software Services (DSS). The service tutorials require no robotics hardware.

The tutorials may be available in multiple languages. Please check the available languages in the table of contents and select the one that fits you.

Service Tutorial 1 – Creating a Service

This tutorial provides the programmer with the basics about what a service is and how to create one.

Service Tutorial 2 – Updating State

This tutorial can modify a service state.

Service Tutorial 3 – Persisting State

This tutorial shows the programmer how to persist, save, the state of a service to a file.

Service Tutorial 4 – Supporting Subscriptions

This tutorial shows the programmer how enable a service to provide notifications to other services.

Service Tutorial 5 – Subscribing

This is the counterpart to the previous tutorial and shows the programmer how to subscribe to other services and explains how to use partner services.

Service Tutorial 6 – Retrieving State and Displaying It Using an XML Transform

In this tutorial the programmer will see how to retrieve the state of another service and how to use an XML transform on the service state to provide a richer user interface through a web browser.

Service Tutorial 7 - Advanced Topics

In this tutorial the programmer will see how to subscribe to a service running on another node and how to configure multiple services running as an orchestration.

Service Tutorial 8 - Generic Service Declaration

This tutorial demonstrates how to define a generic service contract without an actual service implementation. Generic service contracts provide a level of abstraction that can be implemented by many different services that want to share a common service declaration but differ in how they are implemented. Consumers of generic contracts do not have to worry about the different service implementations as they all have the same service state and behavior as defined by the generic contract.

Service Tutorial 9 - Implementing and Extending Service Contracts

This tutorial shows three different ways of implementing and/or extending a generic service contract: Basic implementing, Extending, and using as part of a multi-headed service. The tutorial builds on and uses the generic service declaration shown in Service Tutorial 8. See SQL: Storing, Retrieving, and Manipulating Data in a SQL server for another example of generic contracts and multi-headed services.

Service Tutorial 10 - Service Documentation

This tutorial shows the programmer how to document a service using a variety of mechanisms.

Service Tutorial 11 - Configuring Distributed Applications with the Microsoft DSS Manifest Editor

This tutorial describes how create to distributed applications with existing services using the Microsoft DSS Manifest Editor.

Service Tutorial 12 - Distributed LINQ Queries

DSS supports distributed LINQ queries which means that the query can be computed where the data is produced. This tutorial demonstrates how to modify Service Tutorial 1 (C#) - Creating a Service to subscribe to the Directory Service using a LINQ-based subscription filter.