WCF application start event

Question

What is the best way to get notified when a WCF service is first started?

Is there something similar to the Application_Start method in the Global.asax for an ASP.NET application?

Answer 1

Since it's just a class, you can use a static constructor which will be called the first time the Type is used.

public Service : IContract
{
    public Service(){ // regular constructor }
    static Service(){ // Only called first time it's used. }
}

Answer 2

Well, that might be a bit tricky since the preferred way of calling WCF services is on a "per-call" basis, e.g. you don't really have anything that's "started" and then just hangs around, really.

If you're hosting your service in IIS or WAS, it's even "on-demand loading" of your service host - when a message arrives, the host is instanciated and handles the request.

If you self-host, you either have a console or Winforms app - so you could hook into there to know when they start. If you have a Windows service to host your service host, you most likely override the OnStart and OnStop methods on the ServiceBase class --> hook into there.

The question is more: what exactly are you trying to accomplish? Just logging or something like that, or do you want to have something built up in memory to stick around??

Marc