A bit confused about .NET's WCF configuration basics

Question

I'm new to WCF, so I opened up 2 projects: WCF class library and a host console application. Now, both projects have app.config to store the WCF service configuration settings.

As it seems to me now, and correct me if I'm wrong, I have redundancy in configuring both projects with WCF settings.

How is it done in real world production software ? Does it use separate *.dll library for WCF services, or is it implemented withing the host project (and by that use a single place configuration of it) ?

Thank you .

Answer 1

EliorCohen's answer is correct, but I wanted to expand on a couple of points.

First, your building a WCF class library - library's don't use configuration files on their own. They use the configuration file of the calling application. This is something that I've seen cause a lot of confusion for developers, especially if they create a new class library and they see an App.config file in the project.

Second, with WCF 4 you can actually host a service without specifying anything in the configuration file. The runtime will add default endpoints based on the URI's supplied when you construct the service host.

You can also use set up default bindings and behaviors that will override the normal defaults - for example, if all of your services would be handling large requests, you might want to define a default binding with larger values (by ommitting the name attribute in the Binding configuration).

WCF is wonderful in that it has a lot of options - but that blessing is also a curse at times, especially when you first start working with it.

For more information on default endpoints and stuff, see A Developer's Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation 4.

Note that you'll still need a configuration file for any client apps.

Answer 2

the wcf project you are building represent an implementation of the service. the configuration need to be on the host of the service (your host app).