Question

I am developing a WCF Service in VS 2010 and .NET 4.0.

I am creating the app.config file and I want to specify once the base address for the server.

I’ve declared it into the appConfig section as:

<appSettings>  
  <add key="base_address" value="net.tcp://localhost:5050/Service1/"/>
</appSettings>

I would like to know how can I reference that key into the service/host/baseaAddressses like:

<service
    name="WcfService_callbacks_tcp_auth_username.Service1"
    behaviorConfiguration="beh_auth">
    <host>
      <baseAddresses>
        <add baseAddress="!!!here_the_key!!!"/>
      </baseAddresses>
    </host>
</service>

And in the client/endpoint section like:

<client>
  <endpoint address="!!!here_the_key!!!" binding="netTcpBinding"
            bindingConfiguration="NetTcpBinding_IService1" contract="Service1.IService1"
            name="NetTcpBinding_IService1">
            <identity>
                <certificate encodedValue="..." />
            </identity>
   </endpoint>
</client>

Is there anyway to do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You cannot do that out of the box.

Either you specify the base address explicitly in your WCF config

<service
    name="WcfService_callbacks_tcp_auth_username.Service1"
    behaviorConfiguration="beh_auth">
    <host>
      <baseAddresses>
        <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:5050/Service1"/>
      </baseAddresses>
    </host>
</service>

or you read it from the app.config in code and set it in WCF code (sample for client side – on the service side, you need to call .AddServiceEndpoint() on your ServiceHost):

string customBaseAddress = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["base_address"];

YourServiceClient proxy = 
     new YourServiceClient("NetTcpBinding_IService1",  // endpoint name in config
                           customBaseAddress);         // custom URL

You cannot reference another config settings inside app.config – the .NET config system just doesn’t support that.