SSL WCFs with custom binding

Question

Has anyone ever tried to use custom binding with SSL in a WCF web service? I've seen a number of examples on how to do this with basicHttpBinding and wsHttpBinding but the equivalent always fails for customBinding. Specifically what I'm currently working with (the most successful configuration yet) looks something like this:

<system.serviceModel>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true">
    </serviceHostingEnvironment>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="MyServiceBehavior">
          <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" />
          <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <bindings>
      <customBinding>
        <binding name="binaryHttps">
          <binaryMessageEncoding />
          <httpsTransport />
        </binding>
      </customBinding>
    </bindings>
    <services>
      <service behaviorConfiguration="MyServiceBehavior" name="MyService">
        <host>
          <baseAddresses>
            <add baseAddress="https://(myserver)/"/&gt;
          </baseAddresses>
        </host>
        <endpoint address=""
      binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="binaryHttps"
      contract="MyService" />
        <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpsBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
      </service>
    </services>
  </system.serviceModel>

This actually allows us to access the service from the web, get it's WSDL and add a service reference inside visual studio alright, but when we actually try and use it live in our silverlight-3 application, it just sits there indefinitely waiting for a response and never times out. It actually ends up giving me low memory problems after a while on my machine (with 6GB of memory). The odd thing is that all this worked (and still does) perfectly in the development environment (using strictly the VS application hosts), it wasn't until we tried to deploy it to an actual server with a real SSL certificate that all these issues popped up.

I've searched fairly exhaustively for a solution to this problem but have so far not found anything and have tried just about everything - Is there anyone out there that's encountered this before and got around it?

Answer 1

AFAIK, using SSL has performance problem. We are using WCF behiovr to do the authentication. The way that we are using is that Silverlight => ASP.NET => WCF. We configured the Endpoint behivor in both Silverlight and WCF. Whenever we call the service, we passed the token for authentication.

Are you saying that you can use custom binding in ClientConfig of Silverlight?

Answer 2

So it turns out the problem wasn't with our web.config at all, it had to do with an issue with IIS 7 and Wildcard SSL certificates.

Namely, IIS 7 doesn't allow you to specify the hostname when binding an IP to an SSL connection and certificate. I'd guess that this is because it expects a non-wildcard SSL certificate that it can extract the explicit hostname from. What we ended up having to do was to go into the applicationHost.config file in {WindowsDir}\{System32}\{Inetsrv}\{config} and find the entry with our web service's bound IP address and change it explicitly to (ip):(hostname). It was then even displayed properly in the IIS config GUI.

After doing this we were to completely turn off all but SSL channels on all our servers and everything worked beautifully.

Thank god that's over!