Need to understand the concept from a book - wcf

Question

I am learning WCF using a book named "Window communication foundation 4: step by step". I the second chapter, there was a tutorial about developing windows service for WCF. The client communicates to the named pipe endpoint.
//WCF inside Windows service.
protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
productsServiceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(ProductsServiceImpl));
NetNamedPipeBinding binding = new NetNamedPipeBinding();
productsServiceHost.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IProductsService),
binding, "net.pipe://localhost/ProductsServicePipe");
productsServiceHost.Open();
}
And the client has an endpoint defined in App.config
<endpoint address="net.pipe://localhost/ProductsServicePipe"
binding="netNamedPipeBinding" bindingConfiguration=""
contract="ProductsService.IProductsService"
name="NetNamedPipeBinding_IProductsService" />
I need to create a proxy object to a "Service reference" which is not the windows service I mentioned earlier.
// Create a proxy object and connect to the service
// There service reference for "ProductsServiceClient" is
// "http://localhost:51397/ProductsService/Service.svc"
ProductsServiceClient proxy = new ProductsServiceClient("NetNamedPipeBinding_IProductsService");
Without "ProductsServiceClient", I could not initiate the proxy. Why do I need to that service reference, as I connect to a window service. I could not understand the concept clearly.

Answer 1

In this case the term service is being used in two senses. You have the windows service which is the host for the WCF service. The reason that you had to create a service reference was so that your project could generate all off the code necessary to create a proxy to communicate with the WCF service. As an alternative to adding a service reference you could also have used a Channel Factory. The key thing to understand is that when you are creating a WCF service you generally access that service through the WCF pipeline (via a proxy or a channel factory), even if you are doing so from the project where it is defined.
If it is the case that you are unclear about how to generate a proxy for self hosted WCF service, you should look into how svcutil.exe can used to generate proxies for compiled services.