I’ve been working with WCF fairly extensively for over two years now and have almost always taken the “lazy” route and deployed everything through IIS. Some of the reading I’ve done lately is starting to trend to where developers are using custom hosts in windows services or as console applications. Is there major benefits to switching over to that paradigm or is my current strategy of hosting everything in IIS give me everything I need to do WCF services?
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When you go the self-hosting route, you limit the scalability & reliability options of your services. If scalability isn’t a concern, you still need to consider all the service monitoring functionality that you’d have to create to be sure your services are running reliably.
If I had to pick two reasons to prefer IIS hosting over self-hosting they would be the flexibility of the WAS service instantiation model for IIS 7.x and the Windows Server AppFabric features for WCF 4.