Setting address in Wcf service dynamically - wcf

I have many wcf services in my application.My development server ,test server and production server are different.So when I deploy to different servers I have to change manually every time the service configuration and manually add the address.I think from best practice this is not desirable.
I want to add the address dynamically i.e when I deploy to different address it should automatically read the address.
Please help me how to implement that.

When you deploy a service, there should be no need to specify the server address. Are you referring to the address in the Web.config? If so, this should be a relative address which does not contain the server name, just the folder path relative to the root.
Client, of course, need to specify which environment they wish to access, but this can be programmable and set at run-time so the same client can access different servers. Please let me know if you need more details.

Related

Configure Dynamic WCF-Ports in Biztalk

I have a WCF port (which I got from add generated items>>Consume WCF service). I have exactly the same service on another server which I wanted to use. I reused all artifacts of previously consumed service and only made a copy of WCF port on Biztalk Administration side with different service address, then I bind both ports with appropriate virtual ports, and it is working fine. But is there any possibility to dynamically update binding information of WCF ports at run time with respect to input data (means I dont want to make multiple similar virtual ports in visual studio), I just want that if I want to add another service port I don't change my orchestration again and again. I only make physical port on Biztalk Administration Console side and bind it with some virtual port and it starts working....
Please let me know if there is some confusion...in question.
Thanks in advance.
I used Role Links to dynamically send data to different servers. But binding file remains the same. There is no need to add additional binding files for each service and no need to amend BizTalk project again and again. Just configure ports and make additional parties and you are done.

WCF DiscoveryClient returns references to localhost from remote machines

I have an app with a self-hosted WCF service.
My WCF service gets published under the URI "net.tcp://localhost:8004/DocumentService". When I run the service on a remote machine and try to discover the service with the new .NET 4 class DiscoveryClient, the found services all have the URI "net.tcp://localhost:8004/DocumentService" too without any information about the actual machine where the service is hosted.
Obviously this is useless if I want to access the service on the remote machine. But I can't find any reference to the actual remote machine (IP address or server name) in the arguments passed to FindProgressChanged.
Is there a way to get the information about the remote machine or do I have to publish my service with the machine name of the remote machine? Or is DiscoveryClient just broken?
I hope this make sense.
I spent a lot of time investigating this problem. Building base addresses in the code was not acceptable for me, as it implies hardcoding transport scheme and port (the latter, of course, can be stored in a separate config section, but then why not just to use the existing section?). I wanted to have an ability to just configure the base address in config as usual. And it turns out that a base address like <add baseAddress="net.tcp://*:8731/"/> will perfectly work. I think the same is true for programmatic configuration.

Domain Name Server on Windows for locally hosted websites

I have a half-dozen domains (with associated domain names), hosted locally on Windows/Apache and accessible to the wider internet. At the moment, the name servers are provided by my domain name register at extra cost. I would like to host a domain name service (on the same machine as is hosting the websites).
I have tried BIND without success, I was unable to configure it correctly. I was confused about zones and the syntax of configuration, as well as how to test if it is configured correctly!
Most guides seem directed at users who wish to replicate DNS entries for local caching, whereas I simply want to host a name server (locally) which directs users to my local machine, when they request any of the half-dozen websites I host.
Is there a simple application to host limited Domain Name Service this on Windows (Vista Business), or an obvious tutorial that I haven't found yet? Or was I on the right track with BIND and missing something?
Bind is probably the best choice. The guides you're referring to are talking about configuring a caching resolver. What you want is an authoritative name server. Bind can be a pain to configure because there are so many options, but it's probably worth persevering.
Depends what your budget is..
The DNS Server on Windows 2003 Server is pretty good and easy to configure.
There's a bunch of alternatives list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_server_software
Simple DNS Plus could maybe do the trick for your case, but I haven't tried it.
Another option is maybe to use Bind and try to find a GUI for it, there's a few existing, usually web based, like webmin and such...

WCF (hosting service in IIS) - machine name automattically being picked up by WCF rather than IP?

So, I previously posted about my troubles in moving a working WCF service from my local machine to the development server. The problem was that when moving it over all of the references were by machine name rather than ip. Since i was not accessing it on the domain, I couldn't see the machine name and couldn't access the references. Here was my previous post (.NET WCF service references use server name rather than IP address causing issues when consuming).
I found a solution, but wanted to make sure that this is the proper solution to my issue. And also ask if anyone else had any other input? The solution was to change the IIS site binding. I found the solution at (http://blogs.msdn.com/wenlong/archive/2007/08/02/how-to-change-hostname-in-wsdl-of-an-iis-hosted-service.aspx). The only thing is that I may have to do this for every site as the application that i work with is not hosted and is a web-based solution installed at each site. So i'm possibly going to have to include a script in the build for each site.
I would think that I would be able to make this change in the .config file?
The right way to handle this is to set and explicit host-header in IIS for the Web Site instance. Now, assuming you've only got one host-header applied to the Web Site instance that should be all that you need. However, if you have multiple host-headers configured you will also need to explicitly tell WCF which host to expose itself via. This is done with the configuration element under the element to bind the service to that specific domain.

How can you load balance an IIS 6 hosted WCF Service?

We use BigIP to load balance between our two IIS servers. We recently deployed a WCF service hosted on by IIS 6 onto these two Windows Server 2003R2 servers.
Each server is configured with two host headers: one for the load balancer address, and then a second host header that points only to that server. That way we can reference a specific server in the load balanced group for debugging.
So when we run We immediately got the error:
This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.
Parameter name: item
I did some research and we can implement a filter to tell it to ignore the one of the hosts, but then we cannot access the server from that address.
<serviceHostingEnvironment>
<baseAddressPrefixFilters>
<add prefix="http://domain.com:80"/>
</baseAddressPrefixFilters>
</serviceHostingEnvironment>
What is the best solution in this scenario which would allow us to hit a WCF service via http://domain.com/service.svc and http://server1.domain.com/service.svc?
If we should create our own ServiceFactory as some sites suggest, does anyone have any sample code on this?
Any help is much appreciated.
EDIT: We will need to be able to access the WCF service from either of the two addresses, if at all possible.
Thank you.
On your bigIP Create 2 new virtual servers
http://server1.domain.com/
http://server2.domain.com/
create a pool for each VS with only the specific server in it - so there will be no actual load balancing and access it that way. If you are short on external IP'S you can still use the same IP as your production domain name and just use an irule to direct traffic to the appropriate pool
Hope this helps
The URL it uses is based on the bindings in IIS. Does the website have more than one binding? If it does, or is the WCF service used by multiple sites? If it is, then you are SOL AFAIK. We ran into this issue. Basically, there can be only one IIS binding for HTTP, otherwise it bombs.
Also, here's info on implementing a ServiceHostFactory. That WILL work if it's possible that your WCF service only be accessible through 1 address (unfortunately for us, this was not possible).
When you need to test a specific machine, you could "bypass" the load balancing and ensure the correct host-header is sent to keeep WCF happy by editing the "hosts" file on the machine you're testing from so, for example:
10.0.0.11 through 10.0.0.16 are the six hosts that are in the cluster "cluster.mycompany.local", with a load balanced IP address of 10.0.0.10. When testing you could add a line to the machines hosts file that says "10.0.0.13 cluster.mycompany.local" to be able to hit the third machine in the cluster directly.