Is it possible to host WCF Services with Appfabric Service Bus endpoints in IIS6 on Windows Server 2003 64 bit?
If not, are there any alternatives apart from upgrading the OS or using a Windows Service?
Any help would be great
Steve
I am unaware of any way to accomplish this with "pure" IIS6 as it lacks WAS and the auto-start feature that is needed to hook the IIS application up to the ServiceBus address before that application has actually been "spun up" by some outside client.
That said if you had some kind of start-up task on the server that would make a request to the application so that it could register with the Service Bus inside of the traditional Application OnStart lifecycle event, that could be a possible solution.
Related
We have a client server application.
My application need to be changed to work via WCF service in order to receive/send data to the database (security demands).
I also need another service which be hosted at the client side and will connect the client to the WCF service on the server side connect with Https.
The WCF service on the server is in PerSession mode.
Most of my work with the server is insert / select queries.
So my design is:
Client ->windows service ->WCF server service(iis7) ->database.
This windows service act as client and as server at the same time.
Act as server: for the Client application.
Act as client for the WCF service which located at the server.
The application needs to support XP and forward operating systems with .net 4.
The windows service will need to connect the WCF service on demand only (when the client application is launched).
I need to decide in which way to implement the client windows service.
I prefer to implement it with WCF hosted service with TCP/IP, but it feels like over kill to do so.
Should I use other IPC implementations? And if so which one?
So, what is the best way to implement this Windows service?
Thanks
I do not fully understand the point why a windows service should be used on the client side in order to communicate with the WCF service. But the question was not about architectural patterns...
So, for inter-process communication I would use NetNamedPipeBinding.
You can find more information on how to decide which binding to use here.
Using a WCF service for inter-process communication does not feel overkill to me at all. Actually WCF services are quite lightweight except the host initialization process, which should not happen frequently in case of a windows service I guess. WCF provides reliability and extensibility in exchange for this tiny inconvenience.
[EDITED]
I just reread you post, and I would like to clarify some details about the hosting. You can host a WCF service in a Windows Service, which is explained here, but not the other way around. Sorry, if I misunderstood your question. And yes, TCP/IP for inter-process communication is definitely an overkill, but NetNamedPipeBinding uses shared memory according to this article, so it should be the fastest way.
I plan to start developing with WCF this weekend. Before i get too far along, I'd like to know what I need from my web host? What does our server need to run to enable WCF? Is it standard ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 stuff? Does the host need to do anything to our IIS configuration?
I'm currently hosting our ASP.NET apps, company website, etc. with a third party hosting service. Due to our size, cost, etc. we are using a shared hosting plan and have somewhat limited access to chanign IIS. I'm hoping we don't have any problems that would limit our ability to use WCF.
If you want to host your WCF service in IIS, you need IIS6 (Win Server 2003) or preferably IIS7 (Win Server 2008), the .NET 3.0 (or preferably: .NET 3.5 SP1) framework, and the ability to create virtual directories in IIS (so yes, you need at least some degree of IIS configurability).
That's it! :-)
Marc
You have several options:
You can host in IIS6+ using ASP.NET: simplest, offers integration with ASP.NET runtime (can be disabled to reduce overhead if not needed, imposes requirements on endpoint URLs, restricted to HTTP[S] as transport, all the benefits of IIS worker process management
You can host in IIS7+ using Windows Activation Services (WAS): more advanced, complete control over endpoint URL, can use any transport (TCPIP, HTTP[S], MSMQ, NamedPipes), all the benefits of IIS worker process management
You can host in a custom Windows Service: all the power of WAS except worker process management and you must write your own windows service and you have
For more information, check out this section of the MSDN documentation.
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
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
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.
I've got a WCF service on a server on one side of a firewall. I need to access the service from many workstations on the other side of the firewall. The network guys insist that all holes through the firewall are one-to-one so at the mo, I'll have to set up every workstation one by one. There could be loads and it'll get tedious and be prone to errors.
Is it possible to set up a WCF server on this side of the firewall that can in some clever way just act as a proxy to the 'real' WCF service on the other side of the firewall? If so, could you point me to some reference material?
There is a new concept of a WCF Relay service being developed for the Windows Azure "cloud" computing space. That would allow you to create your scenario fairly easily - just host some bits of your service out in the cloud.
See these links for more information:
WCF services hosted on Windows Azure
Software in the cloud: the Relay service
.NET ServiceBus: Hands-On with Relays
or search Google for "WCF Relay Service". There are also a number of new bindings specifically for these WCF scenarios.
Hope this helps.
Marc
UPDATE:
WCF v4 - to be released with .NET 4.0 later this year (2009) will include a RoutingService class which can be used in scenarios like this.
See more info about the WCF4 routing service here:
Content based routing in WCF 4
Routing messages in WCF 4.0
A developer's introduction to WCF .NET 4 Beta 1
I have a few suggestions, maybe one would work in your case:
Place the WCF service outside the firewall. If the WCF service needs to talk to the database, open the database port for the IP address of the machine running the WCF service.
Program or use code generation to create a WCF service that is simply a pass through layer
There may be some functionality in your firewall that allows you to publish an end point
I've finished writing a WCF service that uses TCP. It is meant to run on a Windows 2003 Server, which doesn't have WAS available, so I've written a Windows service to host my WCF service. It works great on my development machine.
Now, how do I get these two services onto the Windows 2003 Server? Do I just copy the WCF service there and that's it? I would think it would probably be best if I put it into some specific location, but where would that be? And then the hosting Windows service, how do I deploy that to the Windows 2003 Server?
You should have a service deployment project that you've used in the Dev area.
It will be the same technique.
Example of creating a service in c# from codeproject
put it in program files\Your Service