call exe from wcf service

Question

We have a WCF service that we recently switched from self-hosting to IIS-hosted . It needs to launch an executable using Process.Start() . This works fine when it's self-hosted, but when hosted in IIS , we get the error:

TimeOutException was unhandled

void notepad()
{
    System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("notepad").waitForExit();
}

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

when you host your WCF service in IIS, being a server, IIS requires and allows no user interaction and works also if no user is logged in; in that context there is no UI to host your notepad or other UI enabled applications, you could execute a process or other batch jobs but not render a windows UI application, because Windows Explorer is not loaded for you and there is no place to render your process's UI. So you can start processes that have no UI.