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Hosting WCF service in an ASP.NET website

WCF services can be hosted in IIS as an ASP.NET Website. This provides a number of benefits. First of all the service process need not be running for the request to be made, instead it is started when a request is made. Further, IIS mgr can be used to manage the service. One of the main disadvantage of hosting WCF service like this is that it forces the endpoints to use HTTP.

1. Open the solution attached here.

2. Right click on the solution > select add > New Web Site... > select WCF Service template > use ProdSrvWebsiteHost as the name.

2. Expand App_code, look at IService.cs and Service.cs. Delete IService.cs and Service.cs  and open Service.svc and inspect.

3. Add reference to the ProductServiceLibrary

4. Add a ServiceHost directive with Service attribute pointing to Service.svc.

<%@ ServiceHost service="ProductServiceLibrary.ProductService" %>

5. Open web.config and notice that the base address is not specified. Base address specified in the web.config is ignored and instead IIS application's base address is used.

6. Use relative address for endpoints, if using absolute address it should match that of the base address.

    <services>
      <service name="ProductServiceLibrary.ProductService" behaviorConfiguration="MyBehaviorConfig">
        <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="ProductServiceLibrary.IProductService"/>
        <endpoint address="ws" binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="ProductServiceLibrary.IProductService"/> 
      </service>
    </services>

6. Add a name attribute to behavior as shown below

    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="MyBehaviorConfig">
          <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" httpsGetEnabled="true"/>
          <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>

    </behaviors>


7. Right click service.svc > view in browser. Notice that an exception is thrown.

"The service cannot be activated because it does not support ASP.NET compatibility. ASP.NET compatibility is enabled for this application. Turn off ASP.NET compatibility mode in the web.config or add the AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute to the service type with RequirementsMode setting as 'Allowed' or 'Required'."

8. Locate aspNetCompatibilityEnabled attribute in web.config and set it to false.

aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="false"



9. Right click service.svc > view in browser. Now you should be able to access Metadata publishing for the service.

10. update the client service reference - right click on the service reference > select Configure Service Reference > paste the metadata address in the address field > Click OK

11. Check if the app config has been updated, check the endpoints and their addresses to ensure

12. Open programs.cs, update the endpoint name of the client instance to

ProductServiceClient client = new ProductServiceClient("WSHttpBinding_IProductService");

13. Test the client project. If it throws an exception, enable debug to learn more about the exception. To do this open Web.config of ProdSrvWebsiteHost, locate debug and set it to true as shown below:

<compilation debug="true/>.










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