Networking with Silverlight mdcm

As recently announced, I am adapting the C# DICOM library mdcm to Silverlight. Due to the compactness and security limitations of Silverlight, I have had to make several workarounds. However, I have now reached a stage where a large degree of the original library's functionality is in place. The only large part missing now is codec handling, which is highly dependent upon native support libraries in the original mdcm library.

Most recently, I have included network support in the Silverlight library. The client functionality is definitely in place; with the latest commit in the Github repository there is a working example of a storage SCU (service class user).

There are a few restrictions: Silverlight only supports the TCP protocol; there is currently no support for TLS or SSL. The only available port range is 4502-4534, and the port access has to be granted through a separate policy access server. As far as I have been able to find out, the server that the Silverlight client application is communicating with also has to be located on the same system. The supported DNS name of the computer should be obtained as follows:

string DnsHostName = Application.Current.Host.Source.DnsSafeHost;

(I should state that I have not yet learned all the windings of the Silverlight network support, so there may be more flexibility to this than I yet know.)

To test the functionality, I created a new Silverlight hosting web application in my mdcm fork at Github, denoted SL.DicomToXml.Web. When running this web application via Visual Studio, it is possible to open DICOM files on the regular file system. The DICOM file dump is displayed on screen, together with the contained image if any.

In the background, the application is also trying to send the DICOM object to a storage SCP server on port 4502. For this to work, a storage SCP application has to be running on the same computer (I used the storescp application from the OFFIS DCMTK library).

Furthermore, an access policy server has to be running, granting the Silverlight application access to ports 4502 through 4534. Based on code that I obtained from Stackoverflow user luke here, I also included a very simple policy server application, SilverlightPolicyServer, in the mdcm tree. Before any DICOM object sending can take place, the policy server must also be running; double-click the executable or start it from the command prompt.

Getting this to work in Silverlight was a little bit of a challenge. In particular, the Socket class in Silverlight is extremely stripped compared to its vanilla .NET counterpart. The regular mdcm library also makes extensive use of the NetworkStream class for sending and receiving network data. NetworkStream is not included at all in the core Silverlight library. Fortunately Alexander Wieser has developed a replacement in his Crystalbyte Networking project at Codeplex, and this support class was easily included in the Silverlight mdcm library.

While discussing the workarounds I have had to take in the Silverlight mdcm library, I should also mention that file access has been limited to the isolated storage assigned per user and application. This means that DICOM file access is limited to this isolated storage, and it is only practically available when running the Silverlight application. To access files on the regular file system, the most efficient solution is probably to open the file stream directly through an open-file dialog, pretty much like it is done in the demo application.