Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition

More on Behavior Configuration

The service metadata behavior demonstrated in the previous section is just one of many such ready-to-use behaviors, and you will see many examples in the subsequent chapters. You can configure behaviors at the service level (as with the metadata behavior) or at the endpoint level:

<services>
   <service name = "MyService" behaviorConfiguration = "MyServiceBehavior">
      <endpoint behaviorConfiguration = "MyEndpointBehavior"
         ...
      />
   </service>
</services>
<behaviors>
   <endpointBehaviors>
      <behavior name = "MyEndpointBehavior">
         ...
      </behavior>
   </endpointBehaviors>
   <serviceBehaviors>
      <behavior name = "MyServiceBehavior">
         ...
      </behavior>
   </serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>

Similar to default bindings, WCF allows for the notion of a default behavior. A default behavior is a nameless behavior (either a service or an endpoint level) that implicitly affects all services or endpoints that do not explicitly reference a behavior configuration. For example, consider the services MyService1, MyService2, and MyService3. To add the service metadata exchange on all services in the application, you can use this config file:

<services>
   <service name = "MyService1">
      ...
   </service>
   <service name = "MyService2">
      ...
   </service>
</services>
<behaviors>
   <serviceBehaviors>
      <behavior>
         <serviceMetadata/>
      </behavior>
   </serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>

Along with this hosting code:

ServiceHost host1 = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService1));
ServiceHost host2 = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService2));