WCF Hosting

In this part of the tutorial we are going to see the four different way of hosting the WCF service. WCF service cannot exist on its own; it has to be hosted in windows process called as host process. Single host process can host multiple servers and same service type can be hosted in multiple host process. As we discussed there are mainly four different way of hosting the WCF service.

1. IIS hosting
2. Self hosting
3. Windows Activation Service
4. Windows Service

Multiple hosting and protocols supported by WCF.Microsoft has introduced the WCF concept in order to make distributed application development and deployment simple.

Hosting Environment	Supported protocol
Windows console and form application	HTTP,net.tcp,net.pipe,net.msmq
Windows service application (formerly known as NT services)	HTTP,net.tcp,net.pipe,net.msmq
Web server IIS6	http, wshttp
Web server IIS7 - Windows Process Activation Service (WAS)	HTTP,net.tcp,net.pipe,net.msmq

A summary of hosting options and supported features.

Feature	Self-Hosting	IIS Hosting	WAS Hosting
Executable Process/ App Domain	Yes	Yes	Yes
Configuration	App.config	Web.config	Web.config
Activation	Manual at startup	Message-based	Message-based
Idle-Time Management	No	Yes	Yes
Health Monitoring	No	Yes	Yes
Process Recycling	No	Yes	Yes
Management Tools	No	Yes	Yes