Microsoft® Windows® Communication Foundation Step by Step

Managing Exceptions in Service Host Applications

In Chapter 2, you saw how to create a host application for a WCF service and use this application to control the lifecycle of the service. A service host application uses a ServiceHost object to instantiate and manage a WCF service. The ServiceHost class implements a finite-state machine. A ServiceHost object can be in one of a small number of states, and there are well-defined rules that determine how the WCF runtime transitions a ServiceHost object from one state to another. Some of these transitions occur as the result of specific method calls, while others are caused by exceptions in the service, in the communications infrastructure, or in the objects implementing the channel stack. A service ...