How to find out which wcf services are hosted - c#

How can I find out what wcf services are currently hosted, including information like the base address? (with C#)
hosted on the local machine (with Visual Studio or IIS)

There are lots of different ways to host wcf components - IIS, Windows Services, console apps, etc etc. I don't think there's a programmatic way to discover and iterate over them all.

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WCF: Difference between hosting in IIS and WIndows service

WCF service can be hosted both in IIS and in Windows service. What are differences? Is there any benefit hosting in Windows service than IIS?
Check out the documentation: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms730158%28v=vs.110%29.aspx
It is awesome!
And the answer to your questions depends on what kind of application you are building and other requirements on the application/environment...!
Here are some differences (Features of IIS.. Copied from the link provided by #Jocke).
You lose all of the features of IIS (logging, application pool scaling, throttling/config of your site, etc.)...
You have to build every single feature that you want yourself HttpContext?
You lose that since ASP.NET provides that for you. So, I could see that making things like authentication much harder WebDeploy?
IIS has some nice specific features in 8 about handling requests and warming up the service (self-hosted does not)
IIS has the ability to run multiple concurrent sites with applications and virtual directories to advanced topics like load balancing and remote deployments.
If your WCF serivce is self-contained, like a data service, just host it in IIS. Drawback: you'll have to install and configure IIS.
If your WCF service is more of an API or IPC mechanism, used to let other applications talk to your application, it makes more sense to let your application self-host the WCF service, and for that a Windows Service usually is the more sensible approach. Drawbacks: you'll have to install your application as Windows Service, and configure that your application may listen on its configured port.
Please note that self-hosting is not constrained to Windows Services.

How to host WCF web service over the internet?

I work as a C# developer and we have many .NET web services that we use. I am doing some at home development and want to do something similar. I have a database (SQL Server 2012) on a home PC running Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8 installed. I have created a WCF web service in Visual Studio (C#) and it compiles to a .svc file. This just facilitates data exchange between my SQL Server Database and the application I am writing.
I am unfamiliar with how to host the WCF service so that the Windows Form application that I am writing that will be installed on many non-local machines can access it. I figured a WCF service would be the best choice for accessing my database for the WinForm application over the internet.
I also have a domain with a basic Windows package on 1&1.com leftover from a previous project if that helps.
Can anyone give me some steps to get my WCF service hosted so it can be accessed over the internet? Please ask if I forgot to list any needed information.
Two common ways are to host your WCF service from IIS, or to self host it yourself from within a simple wrapper program that acts as a TCP server.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee939285.aspx
The simplest way is to setup IIS and just publish your services like you would a web application; your service will exposed over http/https. Use an appropriate binding like wsHttpBinding or BasicHttpBinding depending on your security needs. Read up to understand the different bindings and what each does and does not support.
In order to host WCF via IIS, at least on Windows Server 2003 and 2008, make sure you follow the install steps, such as adding .NET 3.5.1 / WCF options on older platforms. I believe Server 2012 includes it within .NET 4 framework, but I haven't yet done it on 2012.
Google "WCF hosting IIS" for steps / setup guides.
There are also hosting providers that specifically provide WCF hosting solutions, though I'm pretty sure your current provider, since it supports IIS, should do fine.

Access windows service / WCF service from other machine on LAN

Please bear with me as I am beginner to Windows service / WCF service. After much research I have not been able to find satisfactory solution to my problem. Let me describe my problem in brief:
I want to run one Windows service / WCF service on a machine on LAN. I want to make that service to be consumed by applications running on another machines on the LAN, provided following conditions must be satisfied :
1) I should not need to host Windows service / WCF service to IIS.
2) The URL of service should be configurable in the applications running on other machines on LAN. I should not have to hard code the URL anywhere in those applications (e.g. in App.config or so). Service URL should be accepted from the application user. At the best, the application should find the machine on which the service is running and should call the service from there.
(As a side note, the applications running on other machines are in-browser Silverlight applications.)
Is it a tall order? If not, which of the Windows service and WCF service will suit my requirements? Please provide me any resource if you have.

C# Windows Service latest technology

All,
I have been writting Windows Services for a while in C# deriving from ServiceBase.
So far my services are hosted in servers where they usually listen to message queues and process messages.
Is there a new way of creating such services in WCF ?
Thanks,
MK
Yes. Check out Windows Process Activation Services.
From what I understand, it's very much like how you used to host remoting objects under IIS, but with WAS, you don't need to involve the whole huge IIS stack like you used to.
Microsoft Message Queuing would seem to be what you'd want though there are some offshoots like BizTalk Server that may use similar stuff. Just to toss out an idea or two.
I've started using an open source project called TopShelf to easily create applications that run as either a Windows Service or a console app for debugging.
I've also been hearing a lot about Windows Server App Fabric. Here is a quick blurb from the App Fabric white paper.
AppFabric Hosting Services (originally code-named “Dublin”) doesn’t create some entirely new hosting infrastructure. Instead, it builds on what’s already provided by Internet Information Services (IIS) and Windows Process Activation Service (WAS). On this foundation, AppFabric Hosting Services adds extra capabilities for running and managing WCF services, including workflow services. Figure 7 illustrates this idea.
Windows App Fabric Home

Call A Windows Service from a remote computer

I am going to be coding up a windows service to add users to a computer (users with no rights, ie just for authentication). (As a side note, I plan to use this method.)
I want to be able to call this windows service from another computer.
How is this done? Is this a tall order? Would I be better off just creating a Web Service and hosting it in IIS?
I have some WCF services hosted in IIS on the calling computer (they will do the calling to the proposed windows service). I have found that Hosting in IIS is somewhat problematic, so I would rather not have a second IIS instance to manage unless I need to.
(I will be using Visual Studio 2008 SP1, C# and Windows Server 2003 (for both caller and service host).
Thanks for the help
If you are thinking of hosting a web service in IIS just to communicate with an NT-service on that same machine, that is definitely more trouble than it is worth in this case.
As other answers have indicated you can make a WCF service with the operations you need and host that within the same NT-service that you want to interact with. You can easily secure this with certificates, or user accounts to make sure it is only controlled by the right people/machines.
If you need to control the NT-service itself, there are existing programs such as sc.exe to start, stop, configure, or query the status of your NT-service remotely.
However, you may want to consider seeking a solution without the overhead of creating an custom NT-service and a custom WCF service to interact with it. If you do, the Net User commands (sorry no link - new user limitation) or the AddUsers (see kb 199878/en-us) utility may be sufficient. If your remote "controller" can invoke these commands directly against the target machine you may not have to create any custom software address this need. Additionally you would have less software to maintain and administer on the target machine. You would just be using the built-in OS capabilities and admin utilities.
Finally, you will need to think about the security aspect, NT-services and IIS are usually run under very restricted accounts, many auditors would flip-out over any service running with sufficient permission to create or modify users locally, and especially on other machines. You'll want to make sure that the service could never be used to create users that do have more than the "authenticate" permission you indicated.
Edit: The net user command may not work against another machine's local users, but check out. pspasswd that along with PsExec to create users, should do what you need remotely.
Simply host a WCF service in the Windows Service. You'll then be able to call it remotely.
You can host a WCF service inside a Windows service. Take a look at the TCP binding (NetTcpBinding class). Both client and server will have to use WCF, but that doesn't sound like it will be an issue with your implementation.
Also, the section entitled "Hosting in Windows Services" in this MSDN article provides a walk-through of the process
If the windows service publishes a remoting interface then it can be accessed via that remoting interface.
Otherwise it's the same as accessing any other process running on a remote machine except that there may be some tools (e.g., sc) with built in support for executing against a remote machine (barring firewall complications).
Any IPC mechanisms applies; sockets, web services, remoting, etc...
You could expose a WCF service directly from your windows service. When you start up your windows service, in addition to spinning up any other background processes, you could create an instance of ServiceHost<T> for your service implementation. This would allow you to not only provide WCF access, but also avoid the extra instance of IIS like you requested, and provide TCP, Named Pipes, and WsHttp endpoints. This should give you some nice flexibility in the performance tuning arena, since it sounds like this service will be consumed internally on your network, rather than externally.
You could create a WCF service which will talk to your Windows service on the remote box. Host the WCF component in IIS (or however you'd like so that you can communicate with it) and then call the WCF component from your remote machine.

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