Hosting a WCF Service to spawn local processes via remote command.

Question

I have need for a work project to run a controller application on PC A, which farms out tasks to PC's B-E. Originally I was planning on using something like psexec or WMI to remotely spawn processes with parameters that then connect back to PC A via WCF, but now I'm leaning towards using WCF as a windows service on B-E and having A connect to them and request that processes be spawned. Does this seem like a good solution? What problems am I likely to encounter and where can I find more information about running WCF services?

Answer 1

You shouldn't have any problems doing this, just make sure that you take the proper steps to authenticate and authorize the service, as you don't want anyone to run any arbitrary process on that machine.

In general, you have a few options in hosting a WCF service. You can host it in any .NET environment, and there is specific support for hosting WCF services in IIS as well.

For a good overview of the hosting options available, see the article on MSDN titled "Hosting and Consuming WCF Services":

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332338.aspx

Answer 2

In fact, the WCF Developer Center on is on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/wcf/.