Re: Can autostart WCF thru IIS 6.0 rather than message-based activation?

tomkmvp — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:18:16 GMT

WCFHacker:
We would like to host a WCF service thru IIS 6 that has a long-running thread component that needs to run all the time

That's not really what web servers do.

WCFHacker:
IIS is only a web container, not a larger-scope service container

Correct.

WCFHacker:
Would like to know if we are missing something in this picture

I think what you're missing is that the whole http model is stateless and not designed for long running processes.

Can autostart WCF thru IIS 6.0 rather than message-based activation?

WCFHacker — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:10:51 GMT

One feature of IIS 6 is message-based activation. We would like to host a WCF service thru IIS 6 that has a long-running thread component that needs to run all the time, in addition to accepting http SSL web requests. This does not seem to be possible, since IIS 6 seems to only run in message-activation mode, there is no mode where IIS will automatically start a hosted WCF service when the containing web application starts. Or, is there? It seems without it, IIS is only a web container, not a larger-scope service container. And we then cannot make use of IIS's reliability features (process recycling, health monitoring) that make IIS the advertised preferred platform for WCF services.

Implementing a "hack" of an external process to poke the service (send a request) to make IIS activate the hosted WCF service is not an acceptable option. The whole point of using IIS is to make it reliable enterprise solution.

Would like to know if we are missing something in this picture..

Configuration & Scripting

Re: Can autostart WCF thru IIS 6.0 rather than message-based activation?

Can autostart WCF thru IIS 6.0 rather than message-based activation?