I have an application that is moving over from WCF Http to named pipes since everything is on the same machine. Those in charge have decided not to reference the DLLs directly, so that’s not an alternative. I’m okay moving over to a tcp connection instead, though I don’t know that it gives us any direct performance benefits over http on the same machine. The production host is going to be a IIS 7 server, not a WAS or other service. My machine has IIS 5.1, Cassini, and IIS Express.
I’ve tried the following:
- Virtual Box running windows 7 on my XP machine. The installer craps out.
- Named Pipes on Cassini, not supported.
- Named Pipes on IIS Express, not supported.
- Googling the hell out of the solution, nothing useful found.
What is the best/recommended way to develop WCF NetNamedPipes on XP that does not have IIS 7?
On XP, the WCF binding to named pipes works well for a service which is custom-hosted in a Windows Service process. But if you don’t want to build a custom host you are out of luck: the only protocol supported for hosting in IIS5/6 is HTTP.
WCF service hosting in IIS for protocols other than HTTP depends on WAS, which requires IIS7. This constraint applies equally to the TCP binding, so that is not a workaround as you suggest.
It sounds as if your application is intended to be IIS-hosted in production. If this is a given, I think you have no alternative but to change to a new development platform which supports the target environment.