WCF remote activation without IIS/WAS

Question

Hi

I need to remotely spawn WCF services on a remote machine from a client. I cannot use IIS (no HTTP) or WAS (no Windows Server 2008).

Was wondering if there's a way to do it apart from these hosting environments without having to create a service on the remote machine responsible for the spawning of other WCF services.

If a Windows Service host is the only way, can someone point me to a good article or book for an efficient architecture for doing this (including lifecycle management of spawned WCF services).

Thanks Riko

Answer 1

If you cannot use IIS/WAS, then you're only option left is self-hosting.

You can host your WCF service in either a Windows (NT) Service, or a console app, or any other app you like to have.

The point though is: other than IIS/WAS which will load your service class as needed, when a request comes in and needs to be processed, in a self-hosting environment, you have to have your host app up and running - that's why a NT Service seems like the best choice at least for production environments, a service that can be run even if no one is logged on to the machine. Console or other apps require a user being logged on, and the app must be running.

Hope this helps a bit.

Marc

Answer 2

There is one additional option you can use on Server 2003 - hosting WCF services in COM+: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735856.aspx

This is not as easy as hosting non-HTTP services in WAS on Server 2008, but provides a better supported monitoring and deployment model than hosting as an NT Service. Generally in my experience, though, most people I know have used NT services since is fairly straightforward to generate one in .NET, and then they perf counters or something similar to monitor them in production.