Why/how to migrate self-hosted WCF service to IIS7?

Question

I've written some WCF services, which for development & debugging purposes I ran as self-hosted. Now I've got a web server up and I'm considering whether there is any reason to change my services to run under IIS 7... and if so, how?..

Answer 1

MSDN has an article that explores the different WCF hosting models. Here is what it has to say about Self Hosting:

The following are the advantages of self-hosting:

• Is easy to use: With only a few lines of code you have your service running.
• Is flexible: You can easily control the lifetime of your services through the Open() and Close() methods of ServiceHost.
• Is easy to debug: Debugging WCF services that are hosted in a self-hosted environment provides a familiar way of debugging, without having to attach to separate applications that activate your service.
• Is easy to deploy: In general, deploying simple Windows applications is as easy as xcopy. You don't need any complex deployment scenarios on server farms, and the like, to deploy a simple Windows application that serves as a WCF ServiceHost.
• Supports all bindings and transports: Self-hosting doesn't limit you to out-of-the-box bindings and transports whatsoever. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, IIS limits you to HTTP only.

The following are the disadvantages of self-hosting:

• Limited availability: The service is reachable only when the application is running.
• Limited features: Self-hosted applications have limited support for high availability, easy manageability, robustness, recoverability, versioning, and deployment scenarios. At least, out-of-the-box WCF doesn't provide these, so in a self-hosted scenario you have to implement these features yourself; IIS, for example, comes with several of these features by default.

Answer 2

Good suggestion. Here are the exact steps I used to convert self-hosted to IIS hosted:

Step 1: Create .NET Framework 4 WCF Service Application
Step 2: Add Reference to the WCF DLLs.
Step 3: Right click on Service1.scv (auto-generated) and select "View Markup" Should look like this: code<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="WcfService4.Service1" CodeBehind="Service1.svc.cs" %>code.
Step 4: replace "...Service1" with the services from the DLLs. Remove the tag CodeBehind="Service1.svc.cs".
Step 5: Right click on solution, Publish to your sever/page. Enable "Mark as IIS...".
Step 6: open yourserver/yourpage/Service1.scv

Answer 3

If it ain't broke :)

Seriously: Don't do net.tcp WCF in IIS. Save you a lot of headaches. HTTP WCF should be fine.

Answer 4

I would consider creating a new project using VS2010's "WCF Service Application" project template. You could even just reference your original assembly I suppose. Point is, if you use that template, VS2010 shows a new toolbar that allows you to publish to an IIS server that does all the "hard work" of creating the right config files and folders.