Question

I am currently working on a project and trying to learn about WCF web services.

I have a console application which hosts a WCF service. I have added the URL that it should be accessible on in the <baseAddress> section of the App.config file. When I run the console application in debug mode in Visual Studio I get a popup saying your services have been hosted.

If I run my app outside of visual studio and go to the URL I then can’t connect, I’m guessing I need to do some configuration to make it work but can’t find what I need to do.

I have two questions, how do I get the WCF service that’s hosted within the console app to be accessible via http:// using IIS for Windows and making it available using the Mono C# with an Apache web server.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

Hosting in IIS – For Testing

To host the service in IIS, you need to create a virtual directory. There are two ways of doing this:

For easy testing:

• Right-click your WCF Service Project in Visual Studio, select Properties / Web
• Select “Use Local IIS Web Server” in there.
• Do not enable “Use IIS Express”.
• Project URL is the address where you server should be visible on the web, ie. http://yourhost/somepath/
• Click “Create Virtual Directory” (you may need to run Visual Studio as Administrator for this, but this step is only required once, you don’t need admin privileges for day-to-day use).

After that, your virtual directory is set up and IIS will direct all requests to http://yourhost/somepath to your WCF Service. Note that this will point to the binaries that were generated by Visual Studio inside your project directory, so a rebuild will automatically things.

This is the easiest option for development and testing, you don’t even need to have Visual Studio open, but whatever change you make will automatically be reflected to the deployed instance.

Hosting in IIS – For Production

For production, you need to create a real virtual directory. To do that:

• Create a directory where your service should be hosted, for instance `C:\inetpub\yoursite\yourservice\’, this can be any directory on your file system.
• Copy your web service into this directory (Visual Studio has some way of automating this, though I’ve never used that, so don’t really know how that works).
• Open “Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager” (needs to run as Administrator)
• On the left pane, you’ll your configured IIS instances and sites. If you run this for the first time and the left pane is empty (there should be a default site), simply right-click and select “Add Web Site”.
• Right-click your web site, select “Add Virtual Directory”. Alias is the visible name of the new directory, for instance http://yoursite/alias/ and physical path simply points to the directory where you deployed your service to.

Self-Hosting

Your console app is called self hosting. If this doesn’t work outside Visual Studio, then there’s usually something wrong with your app.config. I have a simple example here.

Hosting with Mono

For Mono, you have three options:

1. Self-hosting
2. Apache with mod-mono for production
3. Apache with mod-mono using current directory for testing

Self-hosting means creating a simple console application that’s doing some

var host = new System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost(typeof(MyService));
host.Open();
Console.WriteLine("Service running");
foreach (var se in host.Description.Endpoints)
    Console.WriteLine(se.Address);
Console.ReadLine();
host.Close();

and running that with Mono on the command-line.

See Cannot access WCF service hosted in Apache with mod-mono for how to setup apache with mod-mono, including some samples.

You also have two options here: either you copy your service into some directory that’s picked up by Apache – or you can also start mod-mono-server manually and specify an arbitrary directory, for instance the current one for testing.