CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wcfiis.net-4.0
thaBadDawg
thaBadDawg

Reputation: 5230

WCF - IIS vs Custom Hosts

I've been working with WCF fairly extensively for over two years now and have almost always taken the "lazy" route and deployed everything through IIS. Some of the reading I've done lately is starting to trend to where developers are using custom hosts in windows services or as console applications. Is there major benefits to switching over to that paradigm or is my current strategy of hosting everything in IIS give me everything I need to do WCF services?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 502

Answers (2)

Tad Donaghe
Tad Donaghe

Reputation: 6588

If you're using a pre-WAS version of IIS (5 or 6), Windows services may be your best (only?) good bet for hosting WCF services that communicate via named pipes or netTCP (anything other than HTTP).

In the 3rd Edition of Programming WCF Services (link), Lowy suggests using Windows Server AppFabric in some situations, and suggests self hosting in a few cases - when you need to use the service bus and IIS 7.5 is not available, for example. Pages 22 and 23 show a couple of simple charts to help determine when to use self hosting over IIS, WAS or AppFabric. I think the first chapter (maybe more) is available for free if you get a Kindle sample.

Other than these scenarios, I'm not sure why you'd ever want to chose any sort of self-hosting over WAS. I'm curious to see if anyone presents good reasons.

Upvotes: 0

Sixto Saez
Sixto Saez

Reputation: 12680

When you go the self-hosting route, you limit the scalability & reliability options of your services. If scalability isn't a concern, you still need to consider all the service monitoring functionality that you'd have to create to be sure your services are running reliably.

If I had to pick two reasons to prefer IIS hosting over self-hosting they would be the flexibility of the WAS service instantiation model for IIS 7.x and the Windows Server AppFabric features for WCF 4.

Upvotes: 2

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