Deploying WCF Service?

Question

I (through a ton of help from everyone here at stack-o) have created a small WCF which is hosted as a Windows service using TCP. Thanks!

Last question for this little bugger; it's time for deployment. In my solution, there are 3 projects. One is the Windows service, another is the imported WCF, and finally a setup project I added for install.

I can install/uninstall the service on my machine by going in the solution directory and finding "Setup.exe" or "Setup.msi". Executing either from explorer will install the service on my development box.

Now there are a few directories associated with this solution. I'm betting that simply copying setup.exe or setup.msi to my target server and trying to run it will bomb out. How can I find out exactly which files/folder I will need to copy over for deployment?

Or should I just copy the entire solution directory? That will be a little difficult for my coworkers as the setup routines are nested in directories 5 deep.

Answer 1

This should be not be that complex. Bin\Debug folder of your windows service is supposed to contain all the dependencies of you windows service. Here you have one set of folder that you need to have.

Now you have WCF service. I am assuming that you are having self hosting so you don't have .svc file. All you might have is your service implementation and its dependencies in another bin\debug folder of your WCF project. Here you have second set of assemblies that you need to deploy.

When you are deploying, either you merged both set of assemblies in one folder or keep them separate. You choice.

Are you facing any problem when you deploy it to server or just worried about the complexity beforehand?

Answer 2

There appears to be nobody on this planet that knows the answer to this question.

So I will write this, so I can close the question.

I would rather delete my question, or mark it as 'closed', but there is no way to do that :-(

Answer 3

Have you even tried??

Basically, if your NT Service is self-sufficient, it shouldn't need anything more than its accompanying config file (YourService.exe.config).

And of course, .NET 3.0 (or preferably 3.5 SP1, or 4.0) needs to be installed on the target machine, to have WCF available.

There's nothing more, really, that you need - unless you've defined it to be part of your install. But if it is important for your app, you should be putting it into your setup, anyway! The setup should really be able to create everything (files, services, directories) that's needed.