controlling the name of a named pipe when hosting WCF net.pipe binding in IIS

Question

I have a service accessible via http and net.pipe. It is being hosted in IIS 7 (Server 2008). I may be hosting different instances of this service for several customers on the same machine and hence the HTTP is setup with virtual hostnames etc. This is all working fine.

I thought I would do similar for the net named pipe binding - using some form of the customers 'virtualhostname' in the named pipe base address, therefore allowing me to access the different customer instances with different net.pipe urns (I realize the net.pipe names are URN's not URL's so they can be essentially arbitrary but I thought I would follow a similar pattern to the HTTP addresses).

Here is my web.config

<service name="Administration" behaviorConfiguration="AdministrationBehavior">
    <endpoint address="" binding="wsHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="normalWsBinding" contract="IAdministration" />
    <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
    <endpoint address="" binding="netNamedPipeBinding" bindingConfiguration="normalNetNamedPipeBinding" contract="IAdministration" />
    <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexNamedPipeBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
    <host>
      <baseAddresses>
        <add baseAddress="http://virtualhostname.com/service" />
        <add baseAddress="net.pipe://virtualhostname.com/administration/service" />
      </baseAddresses>
    </host>
</service>

However, when accessing the WSDL for the service - the base address for the net.pipe seems to be ignored by IIS. Instead I get the real hostname of the machine, and a net.pipe address URN that seems to have been formatted entirely by IIS.

<wsdl:port name="NetNamedPipeBinding_IAdministration" binding="tns:NetNamedPipeBinding_IAdministration">
   <soap12:address location="net.pipe://realhostname/service/Administration.svc"/>
   <wsa10:EndpointReference>
       <wsa10:Address>net.pipe://realhostname.com/service/Administration.svc</wsa10:Address>
       <Identity>
          <Spn>host/realhostname.com</Spn>
       </Identity>
   </wsa10:EndpointReference>
</wsdl:port>

With no control over the way net.pipe names are formed, I will not be able to discriminate between the multiple customer service instances on the machine. Does anyone have any clue as to how the net named pipe binding URN can be controlled within the IIS environment?

(I do a lot of standalone net.pipe hosting during testing (i.e. new ServiceHost()) so I know that my net.pipe bindings do work outside of IIS, and do allow control over the exact named pipe URN used)

If the names can't be controlled within IIS - does anyone have any experience with hosting and accessing multiple separate net.pipe service instances on the same machine?

Answer 1

It appears that the host name portion of the URI is ignored and replaced by the implementation based upon the HostNameComparisonMode of the channel binding. You can try changing it to "Exact" via the service's configuration...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.netnamedpipebinding.hostnamecomparisonmode.aspx

NetNamedPipeBinding.HostnameComparisonMode The HostnameComparisonMode value that indicates whether the hostname is used to reach the service when matching the URI. The default value is StrongWildcard(), which ignores the hostname in the match.

See the configuration syntax here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731291.aspx