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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T00:45:15+00:00

I guess my mind is so engaged in IIS and web applications that I

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I guess my mind is so engaged in IIS and web applications that I can’t think of a reason to go through the trouble of using a self-hosted WCF service. I have always had the availability of IIS so creating a self-hosted WCF service seems like more work than I would want to do. Why would I want to do this?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Lots of points:

    • no need for IIS – this can be a great plus on certain servers
    • you get to completely define the service addresses – with IIS, they’re dictated by server name, name of the virtual directory, plus the name and extension of the SVC file (e.g. http://server/virtualdir/yourservice.svc, while with self-hosting you can use http://Server:7171/Services/MegaService or whatever you like)
    • no risk of running into issues related to app pools being recycled (this can be lessened significantly by using separate dedicated app pools for your WCF services)
    • ability to stop and start the NT services, thus e.g. taking those services offline for a bit (less easily done with IIS, I believe)
    • more control over the creation and the options for the ServiceHost
    • support for all protocols out of the box – netTcpBinding etc. requires additional steps (which might be forgotten) on IIS7 and are impossible to do on IIS6
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