将.asmx Web服务作为Windows服务运行

Question

I'm a total novice on asking questions on this forum - I hope I ask this question correctly.

The problem I'm trying to tackle is this: I have a Visual Studio 2010 project which is for a Web Service. The class which does the work is defined in a ".asmx" file. The class inherits from the "System.Web.Services.WebService" class.

It runs happily on IIS on a server. Clients can make SOAP calls to the Web Service and it actions the requests and sends a response. That's all fine.

The problem is that I want it to run on a Windows 7 PC on which I can't install IIS. So I wish it to run as a Windows Service (if possible). The only "client" of the service will be the user on that PC.

In other words, I wish to run all the code that is in my .asmx as a Windows Service (if possible).

In an ideal world I'd be able to re-use my existing .asmx (if possible), and not have to copy and paste all my code across to a new Windows Service solution.

So my goal is to find the up-to-date way of running an .asmx Web Service as a Windows Service. I'm hoping someone could point me in the right direction on how I accomplish this.

I've done quite a bit of searching, and it looks as though this is very much possible to do. The problem is that a lot of solutions out there, appear to be slightly out of date. Or I've got my concepts rather mixed up.

Based on " How can I deploy my WCF Service without IIS? ", I've had a look at a few things.

The closest I've come is this: " https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms751414.aspx ". However, in this example, the actual class which does the work (the calculator) is actually contained in the service itself. I would have thought you could have separated them out. In other words, have the service create instances of a class that comes from my .asmx file.

The second closes I've come across is " https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332338.aspx#msdnwcfhc_topic4 ", however this is .NET 3.0 and VS 2005. I'm also struggling to understand how to link my existing class into the service.

The other solutions I encounter suggest adding references to "Microsoft.Web.Services3.dll", "System.Web.dll", and "System.Web.Services.dll", although a few people seem to think this is called WSE which was updated to WCF in .net 4.0 and so I should not be using it.

Any pointers as to where I get started?

Answer 1

In an ideal world, you would switch to WCF, as it can easily self-host, host in a service, etc. And there are plenty of examples out there. It is easy enough to migrate the code from ASMX to WCF. But this is 3.5, as NetFX (WCF, WF and WPF were released under 3.5).

With ASMX, you need a server to host with. You can create a simple "server" with the HttpListener class. This may be heavy enough for your purpose.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.httplistener(v=vs.85).aspx

IIS now has a hostable core, which can be used with newer versions of .NET, but if you cannot install the newer versions and have to leave the client machines at 3.0, it is probably not your best option.

You may be able to dig up old source for Cassini, which was Microsoft's implementation that eventually became the hostable web core.

Back in 2008, someone snagged the server in VS, which might be an option. Note that the version on this page is for VS 2008, which means 4.0: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/23939/Light-IIS-Run-Asp-net-without-IIS

Ultidev has a server that is reported to self-host: http://ultidev.com/download/default.aspx

Hope one of these helps.

Answer 2

Just for completeness, here's how I solved this:

In the end I went with running IIS on client PCs and just continued using the asmx.

I found that converting the asmx to WCF to be quite tricky. To be precise, it was the thread handling within the asmx (thread handling coded by someone else), that I found to be quite hard to convert. To explain further the asmx which I was trying to convert, did all its work in a class which inherited from "System.Web.Services.WebService". It could therefore, create an "Application" instance, which it then used to do its thread management.

So rather than try and do the same thing, using "System.ServiceModel" (which doesn't allow me to create an "Application" instance), I thought it easier to just to use IIS on the client PCs. I figured this was a better use of time than recoding a fairly complex asmx. A bit defeatist I know.

Kind regards to all.