Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Hosting and Deploying a WCF Service

For your services to accept requests, they have to be active and running, which means they need to be hosted in some runtime environment. Recall that when we covered web services, they were hosted for us by IIS. You can host your WCF services there too. However, there are additional options available to you.

You want to pick your host based on your needs. For example, if you have a peer-to-peer application, you might already know that each peer can host its own services. You also need to consider issues such as deployment, flexibility, monitoring, process lifetime management, security, and more. The following provides a brief overview of the WCF host options available to you:

• Self-Hosted—A self-hosted service ...