What are the ramifications of an unconfigured (but working) endpoint?

Question

I have a fully functional wcf service where I can perform CRUD operations using jQuery on the client. I want this small service application to be portable so I am trying to avoid any app or web.config settings (e.g. Specific address endpoints). I have compiled my service application into a small dll file and have tried it in several different projects hosted at various web addresses. Everything works fine.

The only setting I put in the web.config file was for aspNetCompatibilityEnabled because I am using forms authentication. I did not define a name or a namespace for my service contract and my app.config file is empty sans a connectionstring. When I type in the address to my .svc file I get the 'endpoint not found error'. However my service is fully functional when I use the UriTemplates I defined in my operation contracts. What are the ramifications of this?

I don't care about exposing my data objects or methods on the .svc file. I just need this service to be portable and not blow up due to some unforeseen error.

Cautiously optimistic.

UPDATE After further investigation it appears my example above is the default behavior for WCF. There is a good article from MS that explains it here.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what do you mean by portable. Your service is in dll, which can be used in any web application. Then it depends on your version of .NET Framework.

In .NET 3.5 you have to host the service in .svc file and configure it (service, endpoints, behaviors, AspNetCompatibility) in configuration file or in code.

In .NET 4.0 you can take advantage of simplyfied configuration model which can create endpoints for you based on other provided information. You can host the service in .svc file, by configuration based activation or by service route. In all cases it is important to use WebServiceHostFactory to allow automatic creation of endpoint using WebHttpBinding. You only need to configure AspNetCompatibility. If you need to futher specify webHttp behavior you can place it also in configuration without specifying behavior's name. Such behavior will be taken as default for all services (also not possible in .NET 3.5).

In neither case you don't need to configure base address because it is always taken from hosting web application.