How can I deploy my WCF Service without IIS?

Question

I'm doing some quick Java-.NET interop and have decided on POX with WCF. However, I don't want to -- nor have access to -- deploy to IIS.

Would just wrapping it up as a .NET Service be the way to go? (I've built my fair share of Windows services in my years.)

Are there any good samples around of this?

What handles the HTTP if I'm not using IIS?

I'm open to any suggestion that will allow me to create a simple http-based, xml contract.

Also, it's important to note that this will only be exposed to the internal server farm, so security and all that is pretty minimal with this.

(Searching Google isn't delivering very good results because of all the Blog spam.)

Answer 1

You can deploy it as Windows service and expose an http endpoint. Check the following url.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms751414.aspx

Answer 2

If you're already comfortable writing Windows Services, then that's probably your best bet. I believe that WCF itself handles the HTTP stuff outside of IIS.

Michele Bustamante has a tutorial on setting up Windows Services in her excellent "Learning WCF" book.

This article covers different ways to host WCF services. It mentions VS2005, but VS2008 is similar enough that you should be able to follow along.