Hi there,
I now have a scenario where I have 6 console apps on my server which each host a WCF service.
It's getting messy and I am now thinking about having a windows app (probably WPF) which hosts each service in a separate thread. This would mean there's a central place to manage the services as well.
I'm just wondering if anyone has implemented such an app or any advice before going forward?
I work on a system that has ~8 windows services, all hosting 1 WCF service each. To easily coordinate the execution of the services, we created a service coordinator application that when started, will start the other 8 services. This makes starting, stopping, and restarting the services really easily... and because they're windows services and not console applications, there's no desktop space lost.
The projects themselves are actually compiled as console applications, so that we can work on them easily during development (and also run them with a /debug argument to test them after they've been deployed). Maybe something like that will work for you.
...which hosts each service in a separate thread...
why? By default the WCF runtime is doing the threading for you. MSDN has a god starting point on this or have a look at Programming WCF Services by Juval.
To host multiple services in one thread you could check out this multi-service-host (using AppDomains for separation). I've done a very similar host before reading this and it is now hosting >100 services (started with 30 something) for thousands of users in a single operating system service.