Learning WCF

Self-Hosting

Self-hosting is the simplest way to host your services, but it is also the approach that yields the least number of hosting features. As the label implies, self-hosting requires you to write the code necessary to initialize the ServiceHost and manage its lifetime. At a minimum, you provide a managed process, instantiate a ServiceHost for each service, and then initialize them with endpoints and binding configurations that define the communication channel for each endpoint for incoming messages.

Typically, you’ll keep ServiceHost instances alive for the lifetime of the application in which they are hosted. The ServiceHost is normally constructed on the application thread, but the service model allocates worker threads for incoming requests to its service endpoints. Your job is to keep that application thread and the ServiceHost alive as long as you want to process requests. Any managed process will suffice for this purpose including console, Windows Forms, WPF, and Windows services, as I discussed earlier.

Console Applications

Console applications are a popular hosting environment for developing and testing services. As I discussed earlier, you need only create and open the ServiceHost instance and keep the console process alive to receive and process requests. Example 4-2 illustrates how a typical console application achieves this, using Console.ReadLine( ) to keep the thread alive.

Console applications are ultimately impractical for deploying production services for a ...