How to consume a wcf service hosted on a remote machine?

Question

Hi All I have written a wcf service and hosted it on windows service. This windows service is started and running on a machine say 'A'. Now I wanted to write a client application on another machine say 'B' and wanted to consume the wcf servie on machine 'A'. For this when I tried to add Service reference, I have given the endpoint address of the wcf service on machine 'A'which is "http://localhost:8733/Design_Time_Addresses/NebulaDataModelService/Service1/".

But it could not be added giving the error "No connection could be made...".

Can anyone tell me how should I define the endpoint address of a wcf service so that it can be consumed by clients from different machines?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Normally you do not have to do anything special with the endpoint addess on the server to be able to consume it in a client.

The problem could be a number of things:

• wrong url (is it WCF 4? otherwise you probably need to specify the .svc file at the end of your service) -> change the url to include the .svc file at the end (e.g. Service1.svc)
• firewall on machine 'A' is blocking port 8733 (if you get an error with 'actively refused...' in it, this could be the case)
• easiest way to test this in a browser is by adding ?wsdl at the end of your url, if that works and show you an xml file, the service is reachable