Sharepoint 2010 Custom WCF Service Application Development

Question

What is the advantages and disadvantages of using custom WCF services as a way for developing custom applications(multiple, more than 10) under sharepoint 2010.

Is it recommended to go this way or not?

PS: I am using Custom WCF Service not Internally SP services as the data is placed in external database.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Wcf is a standard and feature-rich way for exposing .net web services supporting SOAP and other standards and different types of hosting. SharePoint portal provide IIS hosting for you app which (probably) depends from SP infrastructure, thus shouldn't be available when SP is not avaliable.

But IIS hosting is for 'passive' services (please refer to Different Types of Hosting WCF application and there advantages ). I had problems with wcf factories recommended officially (for ex. here ), so I can only suggest my way of hosting WCF within SharePoint environment