Hosting Features
There are three types of hosting environments for WCF services. You can host services in IIS 6.0 over HTTP protocol; with the WAS over any protocol; or by self-hosting. The term self-hosting refers to any application that provides its own code to initialize the hosting environment, like you have seen in earlier chapters with console and Windows host applications. Self-hosting can also include Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and managed Windows service applications.
Each hosting environment enables you to expose services to client applications. Through the service model, they facilitate request processing to service operations, but some hosts can also play a critical role in the availability and scalability of your services. Here are some important features that a great hosting environment should provide:
- Executable process/application domain
Any managed process can host WCF services, which implies the existence of an application domain. All .NET code is run inside an application domain, which is a .NET construct that acts as a security boundary and provides fault isolation. A process can load one or more application domains, each with different code access security settings. If an unexpected problem propagates an exception up to the runtime, the application domain is torn down, but the process can remain alive if the main application domain is still present.
- Configuration
Hosts should provide a way to configure services, supporting a flexible and manageable deployment ...
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