hosting a WCF + ASP.NET website

Question

I'm working on a website written in ASP.NET that will access a WCF app. and possibly, some parts will be developped using Flex.

So, I'm already looking for hosting for my app. I want to know :

-what good providers are there out there that can provide me hosting for all the parts of my app ? (WCF, ASP.NET, and Flex(?,don't know flex yet)).

-I'm looking for commercial hosting providers as well as free ones.

-would it be good to just host it all on Microsoft Azure ? are there any benefits ?

P.S: I'm new to this. still learning WCF and even though, I have created an ASP.NET website before, i've never deployed it.

Answer 1

It's not clear what role WCF and Flex have in your design, and what app is going to consume your WCF service. If you're simply using WCF as a service to suply data to AJAX in your ASP.NET application, then ASP.NET does a fine job of hosting WCF services. Right-click on your web project and select "add new item". Then from the list of items, select ASP.NET WCF service. It's really just about that easy.

ASP.NET will generate a ____.svc file that is the WCF host. The "code-behind" for this is your service code. All the configuration and bindings are in web.config. When you build a WCF service this way, it's part of the ASP.NET server-side; it runs the full ASP.NET page life cycle, and has full access to ASP.NET authentication, authorization, session state, etc.

ASP.NET AJAX works very well with this model; if you list your service in the ScriptManager tag, it will build the client-side proxies for you. It's incredibly easy once you get it working.

Since this is all ASP.NET, any commercial provider who is on .NET 3.5 with SP1 should support this automatically.

Flex is the wildcard here, and I can't answer that part. Hosting WCF in ASP.NET restricts you to WCF's webHttpBinding which I think should be basic WS and SOAP protocol.

Answer 2

In regards to hosting, I think the biggest value that Windows Azure provides is scalability. If you believe that your new application is going to need to scale rapidly (meaning that you think a lot of traffic will come and use a lot of resources), Windows Azure is definately worth looking at.

Personally, I host my sites at GoDaddy and have found it to meet my needs. At the same time, I'm diving into Windows Azure in the event that one of my sites takes off.

This is just my two cents.