Exposing WCF Services from Azure to Third Parties

Question

Hello everyone,

I have a situation where I am hosting a WCF service in Azure and I want to be able to expose that service to third-party developers around the world. From the research I have done, I see that there have been bugs (or maybe "features") in Azure due to internal architecture that has made it difficult to add proper service references in client projects.

When the service is run locally -- using the local development fabric -- no problem. I have seen posts indicating an Azure workaround where you:

1. Deploy the service locally first
2. Create the client project's service reference while the ASP.NET project is still debugging
3. Note the service URL from the ASP.NET project
4. Combine this URL with the port from Azure project in the client's app.config endpoint

That's all well and good, but I need to publish this WCF service with Azure and expose it publicly to third-party developers to access and use it. I do not want (and am not able) to provide the service project to all of these third parties to build locally first.

I've heard word that there is a patch to make this work, but have been unable to find it.

Does such a patch exist? Or is there some kind of workaround that will allow public exposure of my services via Azure?

Thanks,
Jeff

Answer 1

See http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wcfazure/Wiki/View.aspx?title=KnownIssues&referringTitle=Home. If you do what's suggested there, you should have no trouble.