Question

I have been working on a Silverlight app that consumes a WCF service. [on Visual Studio]

as a matter of simplicity I created a WCF service in the project itself [as-in I didnt host it in IIS, but let the build-in webdev server in VS do it for me]

It works well, now I want to deploy it on IIS 7.0, can you tell me If i would need to host the service independently and then the remaining stuff or if I just publish the website, the service would be hosted too and the Silverlight client would be able to communicate with the service.

Please help!

Thanks

Answer 1

You basically need

• a virtual directory in IIS 7
• a SVC file (service file) that instructs IIS how to instantiate your service

You basically have three options to deploy your service implementation:

• you can put your service implementation into the code-behind file of the SVC file – that would be my least favourable option – basically don’t do it – it gets messy and offers no benefit

• you can put your service class file (the MyService.cs file) and the interface file (IMyService.cs) into the App_Code directory (if you’re using a Web Site project type) – again, I don’t particularly like this approach

• your best option: put your service contract (the interface) and your service implementation into a separate class-library assembly for that service, and deploy that MyService.dll into the .\bin directory below the virtual directory where your SVC file lives.

Then add a *.svc file (pure text file) to your virtual directory, which contains:

<%@ServiceHost language="c#" Debug="true" Service="MyService" %>

And of course, you need the appropriate web.config entries – but I’m sure you already have those, right?

Your service address now is:

http://YourServer/VirtualDirectory/YourService.svc

For more info, see How to: Host a WCF Service in IIS