Skip to Content
Professional WCF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows® Communication Foundation
book

Professional WCF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows® Communication Foundation

by Scott Klein
April 2007
Intermediate to advanced
451 pages
10h 40m
English
Wrox
Content preview from Professional WCF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows® Communication Foundation

Chapter 15. Hosting Windows Communication Foundation Services

Windows Communication Foundation services can be hosted in many different ways. Up until this chapter, all the examples have either hosted the service in IIS or a Windows forms application. But that is just the "tip of the iceberg" because WCF services can also be hosted in a traditional Windows service and a Windows Process Activation Service. For those familiar with .NET Remoting technologies, using Windows services and IIS (itself a Windows service) for a host should appear familiar.

Hosting a WCF service refers to the environment that the service exists and operates in. There are two primary hosting modalities:

  • Self-hosting, which means that you will build the host environment yourself

  • Hosted, which means that you will use a built-in hosting environment such as IIS

This chapter discusses the many different hosting scenarios in which to host a WCF service. In particular, this chapter covers the following hosting topics:

  • Hosting versus self-hosting

  • Available hosting options

Windows Communication Foundation services are designed to run in any process that supports managed code, including NT services, traditional EXEs, as well as the aforementioned Windows Process Activation Service (WAS). The great thing about this is that the code for your service will look the same regardless of the hosting environment because of the unified programming model that WCF provides for building service-oriented applications.

Hosting versus Self-Hosting ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4

Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4

Pablo Cibraro, Kurt Claeys, Fabio Cozzolino, Johann Grabner

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470089842Purchase book