Question

Is there a way to have custom defined friendly URLs with WCF without IIS?

In particular I’m looking to do something like this via an app.config hosted in my own Windows service:

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "foo/{id}")]
public string GetFoo(string id)
{
   ...
}

Answer 1

Yes sure – host this inside your own NT Service, and in your app.config, define a http base address. The URI templates you define in your service contract will be off that base address:

<services>
   <service name="YourNamespace.YourServiceClass">
      <host>
         <baseAddresses>
             <add baseAddress="http://YourServer:9091/Services/" />
         </baseAddresses>
      </host>
      <endpoint address="" 
                binding="webHttpBinding" 
                contract="YourNamespace.IYourService" />    
   </service>
</services>

Then your URI template will be added to this base address, so in that case, you GetFoo method would be callable at:

http://YourServer:9091/Services/foo/42

Update: I just recreated this here, and the problem is this: your URI template defines a parameter called {id}, but the method you apply this URI template to doesn’t have any parameter called id in it’s parameter list:

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "foo/{id}")]
public string GetFoo(string fooID)

You need to make sure those things match! With the given URI template, you need to change your method declaration to:

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "foo/{id}")]
public string GetFoo(string id)

(see the parameter – it’s name is now id) and then you should be fine – at least it works just fine for me.