在现有WCF应用程序（IIS）中托管一个ASP.net MVC 4站点

Question

My company provides a large scale SOAP application with .Net WCF. Inside this existing WCF application we now need to host an Asp.net MVC 4 (or 5) website. This means we need some kind of routing, that URIs of a specific kind are completely redirected to the Asp-Subcomponent and processed as if it was a separate application.

Searching for this issue I only find solutions where you do it the other way round - for sure the routing inside Asp MVC towards a WCF subcomponent would be quite easy and straight-forward. However, this is not possible in our case. The WCF contains a lot of security hooks we can not (and absolutely do not want to) transfer into the Asp component. On the other hand, dividing it into two separate applications and let IIS do the routing is also no possible solution, since our application as a vast bunch of dependencies with other software packages of our company which we do not want to maintain twice in separate apps.

The existing WCF component is hosted as a separate web application inside a IIS 7.5 with a .NET 4.0 application pool.

Is there any reasonable way of sub-routing from WCF to Asp.net MVC?

Answer 1

This approach sounds like it is going to cause you and your company more issues than it is worth. I see that you've mentioned that splitting it into two separate components is impossible, however I would consider it for a few reasons.

1. Authentication and Authorization in WCF and MVC differ considerably, I would refactor these this code into a library that wasn't dependent on each technology and then write a WCF and MVC abstraction for each application. That was you get reuse but also have two components that understand the underlying technology

2. Routing WCF doesn't understand routes, it only has a sinlge entry point. Decision making of which method to be called it embedded in the payload of the message. MVC on the other hand routes based on the url.

3. Deploying Updates to the MVC site will require WCF Service updates and vice ce versa

These are just some off the top of my head. It just seems overly complicated and hacky to do it this way. I'd consider two applications hosted separately in IIS with common logic extracted into common class libraries that allow for reuse.

Answer 2

I suggest you give WCF Services and ASP.NET a thorough read.

You are going to find it extremely difficult (or at least pioneering) to get WCF to sit between IIS and ASP.NET. They are designed to work side by side, or independently.

Given it's pretty straightforward to have WCF and ASP.NET/MVC use the same underlying authentication system (eg Forms Auth), your main objection to architecting it right seems to be the "vast bunch of dependencies with other software packages of our company which we do not want to maintain twice in separate apps".

Again solving that seems to be a pretty straightforward bit of refactoring. Your task would be just to extract out all the WCF specific code from the business logic, then put the business logic into a separate class library to be shared between WCF and MVC apps. To me there is no other sensible approach to solving your problem than this. Any other approach is probably going to leave you even more of a mess than the (monolithic sounding) WCF app you have currently.