Consumption of WCF Service during development

-Balaji Ramasamy

As I was working on project, it demanded to run the WCF service during development which was a challenging task for a novice developer. We successfully developed the WCF service by implementing the service contract interface & service behavior class. The above developed WCF service needs to be consumed by the client application, which will interact with the end point of the services and provides the requested response. To successfully build and test the application, the WCF service needs to be exposed, which will be consumed by client application with the help of svcutil tool. Since the WCF service is a class library, we can’t run it as service.

So here comes the question of how to run the WCF service to generate and consume the service proxy in my client windows application during development. We are very much aware of hosting the service via the console application, winforms application, windows service, IIS, WAS to host the WCF service. Initially we ran the WCF service as windows service, assuming it as a right decision, which resulted in multiple installation and un-installation of windows service. To avoid such painful process during development, we planned to run the WCF service in console application. But how to run in console application? Here comes the ServiceHost runtime, which will enable to the WCF service to load the service class, set up the endpoints and channel listeners, which provides your service class an “ecosystem” to live and operate in.

You can either instantiate a ServiceHost class yourself in a console app, a Windows service, or even a Winforms app, and thus make your WCF service class available to the outside world - or you can delegate that work to IIS or WAS. Even IIS or WAS will use a ServiceHost to host your WCF service - they just do it automatically behind the scenes.

The following is the console application code to run the WCF service

internal class Program

{

private static void Main(string[] args)

{

try

{

StartService();

Console.WriteLine("Service is running...");

Console.WriteLine("Press key to end...");

Console.ReadLine();

StopService();

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

//Log the Exception

}

}

internal static ServiceHost myServiceHost = null;

internal static void StartService()

{

try

{

myServiceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof([namespaceName.ServiceBehaviourClassName]));

myServiceHost.Open();

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

//Log the Exception

}

}

internal static void StopService()

{

try

{

if (myServiceHost.State != CommunicationState.Closed)

myServiceHost.Close();

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

//Log the Exception

}

}

} 

And the Application configuration includes be the following

<system.serviceModel>

 <services>

  <service name="[namespaceName.ServiceBehaviourClassName]"

  behaviorConfiguration="metadataSupport">

   <host>

    <baseAddresses>

    <add baseAddress="[EndPoint Address]" />

    </baseAddresses>

   </host>

  <endpoint address="" binding="[Binding Name]"

   contract="[namespaceName.ServiceContractName]" "/>

  <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexNamedPipeBinding"

   contract="IMetadataExchange"/>

 </service>

</services>

<behaviors>

  <serviceBehaviors>

   <behavior name="metadataSupport">

   <serviceMetadata />

   <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />

   </behavior>

  </serviceBehaviors>

</behaviors>

</system.serviceModel>

Note: Application Configuration may vary from one binding to another binding. Please check Microsoft MSDN site for more details about bindings and its related configuration

Now run the service and its ready to consume in the client application during development stage of our application

References:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332338.aspx