instantiating multiple WCF services

Question

Suppose you are controlling a set of industrial devices through WCF services. Each device will host their own WCF service. Let's call this generic WCF service MyDeviceController I want to write once and deploy on each device. However for testing purposes, I also want to deploy all the WCF instances on one local box.

Given this context, how do you deploy multiple instances of a WCF services both local and multiple boxes?

If I am being too vague, please help me clarify my question. I more than happy to edit it.

Answer 1

I wrote an easy to handle service host once:

public static class SimpleServiceHost<ServiceContract, Service>
{
    private static Thread hostThread;
    private static object _lockStart = new object();
    private static object _lockStop = new object();

    public static bool IsRunning { get; set; }

    public static void WaitUntilIsStarted()
    {
        while (!IsRunning)
        {
            Thread.Sleep(100);
        }

    }

    public static void Start(Binding binding, string host, string path, int port)
    {
        var serviceUri = new UriBuilder(binding.Scheme, host, port, path).Uri;
        Start(binding, serviceUri);
    }

    public static void Start(Binding binding, Uri serviceUri)
    {
        lock (_lockStart)
        {
            if (hostThread == null || !hostThread.IsAlive)
            {
                hostThread = new System.Threading.Thread(() =>
                {
                    using (ServiceHost internalHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(Service)))
                    {
                        internalHost.Faulted += new EventHandler((o, ea) =>
                            {
                                IsRunning = false;
                                throw new InvalidOperationException("The host is in the faulted state!");
                            });
                        internalHost.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(ServiceContract), binding, serviceUri);

                        try
                        {
                            internalHost.Open();
                            IsRunning = true;
                        }
                        catch
                        {
                            IsRunning = false;
                        }

                        while (true)
                            Thread.Sleep(100);
                    }
                });
            }

            hostThread.Start();
        }
    }

    public static void Stop()
    {
        lock (_lockStart)
        {
            lock (_lockStop)
            {
                hostThread.Abort();
                IsRunning = false;
            }
        }
    }

}

So if you are willing to use multiple contracts you can just call like this:

SimpleServiceHost<IService, Service>.Start(new BasicHttpBinding(), "localhost", "TestService", 8086);

Otherwise make my service host work like a factory and return instances when calling start. You probably will need to enhance the class to fulfill your requirements. But you save a lot of code especially when you need to dynamically host several services ;-)

Regards Jan