Basically I have a WCF hosted in multiple Windows Services (before anyone asks IIS cannot be used for multiple and very valid reasons). I have a control application that allows the Windows Services to be stop/started/restarted in special orders (with several differing parameters) etc but I need some way of knowing what address each windows service is hosting i.e. a function that either
given an address e.g.
http://me.us.com:8701/MyWCFService/MyWCFConfig returns service
name/PID
or better still
given a PID/service name returns the address(es) hosted e.g.
http://me.us.com:8701/MyWCFService/MyWCFConfig
Any ideas, code or thoughts on this folks?
Thanks in advance for taking the time,
Brian
Related
I am trying to come up with a way to accomplish something but haven't been able to find what I am looking for yet.
4 Developers
1 Development webserver
1 Development WCF server
We each have our own website for testing/debugging on the one server using IIS6. We each have our own port number that distinguishes what site we are connecting to.
When our websites make a request for the WCF server the hosts file on our dev webserver points it at our dev WCF server. Likewise, the production webserver's hosts file points it at our production WCF server. This way we never have to worry about changing the Address of our service references in Visual Studio.
Recently we have a need for multiple developers to be working on multiple branches of the WCF code at the same time. Currently we have to take turns using the WCF server.
We want the ability to have our individual websites on the dev webserver point at individual WCF websites on our dev WCF server.
I have tried several ways I thought of but they all require us to update the Address in the service reference in Visual Studio. (currently if we update/add a service call we point our local machine's host file at the dev site after the new WCF code has been deployed to it.)
Does anyone have any idea, or a direction of where I can find common configurations for this type of thing? I have to assume that Microsoft has a best practices setup for multiple developers with multiple dev environments for websites and WCF sites.
Requirements of the setup:
We only get a single webserver for website testing.
We only get a single webserver for WCF testing.
We need a solution that doesn't require us to update the Address in the service reference in Visual Studio when developing on the WCF code.
If worse comes to worse we may have to think about changing the requirements.
Thank you in advance!
You can simply change the address of the service in configuration file for each deployment. You don't need to change the address of service reference until the service has changed in the way that would produce different client proxy code.
i am new in wcf and started learning. i got one confusion like that i create a small wcf service and just do not host it in IIS,console apps or win service but from another apps i can add the service reference of svc file and found it is working. if wcf can work without hosting in any place like "IIS,console apps or win service " then why people would alway host wcf service in IIS,console apps or win service. can anyone tell me the reason.
people use IIS and windows services in general because they are simpler to setup and run more consistently. they can also be hosted more easily on servers where the services can be configured to start automatically, and as usually wcf is used as a server communication method it is usually this that you want to do.
hosting in console applications is generally easier to setup for simple examples for testing purposes, when you want to test your services locally.
Whilst hosting in applications as possible it's a less common scenario to use wcf to communicate between 2 applications on the same machine.
EDIT:
Your original question asked why people always talk about IIS, services etc. The point I was making was that usually wcf is used for web services, and is usually run on a server other than the local machine. Even though it can be used for inter process communication on the same machine this is not the most common use case. This is why you see a lot of examples using IIS and not too many hosting it in a Windows forms app.
Kindly help me in architecting a solution which is required for my ongoing project.
I have developed some WCF Services hosted as windows services which I did and working fine so far. Now I am asked to develop a master WCF type of service which should be intelligent enough to manage all other WCF service for possible corruption/errors and can repair them and restart.
Thanks in advance.
As we have written a custom host and took us years to make it a real application server, I will share some of the challenges that we had. Creating a custom host that manages WCF services as an NT service is a very challenging task if you want to manage all of the details and treat the NT service as a real service host. The challenges start from managing multiple Appdomains ( one for each Service ), managing the statuses of the services, startup times, deployments from the IDE and the worst of all is activation. Have you considered how to implement that? If you do not have this feature, it means that all of your services will be active and in memory at all times. IIS and Appfabric do that very well and trust me , it is noty easy to implement. The other part that was challenging was a UI to manage this host and offcourse a UI that can manage multiple hosts ( NT services running on different boxes ). Do you need a discovery proxy implementation? And at last how about if you want to manage services running in your custom host , IIS and App fabric the same way?
Think about before doing such an implementation because the scope may crypt on you as you do it.
I do something similar here.
Create a Dictionary<key, ApplicationDomain> collection into your main program
Key: something unique for each application domain, like a Guid or a System.Type.
That ApplicationDomain class exposes a internal property to access your AppDomain proxy (that which inherits a MarshallByRef class)
Load your WCF host into main program, so you'll get access to that collection
Every time your service get some access, you just need to take that key, access your proxy and do anything you want within your service hoster.
Keypoint: Your service must have access to all your service hosts.
I have two Services called TemplateService, TemplateReportService (both defined in one WCF Service Library) to be exposed to the client application.
Is it possible to host these two services under one Windows Service?
Thank you!
Yes, it is possible. Create two ServiceHost with different endpoints and open both of them when starting the windows service. You can even use the same port (if using net.tcp bindings) by enabling port sharing.
I personally hosted more than 80 services in one process by scanning a specific directory for assemblies with services inside (reflection). This was running on a quite powerful machine (8 cores, 16GB) with thousands of users. Shortly after finishing this I found this link: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/alon/archive/2008/03/12/hosting-plug-in-wcf-services.aspx which is basicly doing the same but with a better separation between service hosts by using application domains. On a second try I would use this host.
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.