Windows Service Host - No IIS - Where does Dublin fit?

Question

Hi

Our local, load balanced app servers host our WCF endpoints via windows services. It's the local network, .net to .net, tcp + binary serialization: high throughput, high performance scenario.

IIS isn't even installed on the app server boxes since it's not needed (and you don't need to harden what's not there, even with ).

I've only seen a little bit of the Dublin information but it seems to be all IIS extension this, IIS extension that...

Is Dublin going to provide a direct alternative to WCF hosted under a windows service?

Cheers

Ed


Update: I forgot to mention those servers are W2K3...

Answer 1

It would be good to understand your reason for using Windows Services to host your WCF services. Are these services stateful and hold onto application state for long periods of time? How many of these WCF services do you have per machine? Do you need to have these services permanently available (running in memory) and if so why?

I think that your answer will be - we have to run on W2K3 servers and cannot move to W2k8 server. Is this the case?

Dublin uses IIS Manager extensions to provide a tooling story to manage and monitor WCF and WF applications, identical to ASP.NET IIS Manager extensions. When is comes to hosting services you do not need IIS, just WAS (Windows process Activation Service) installed as the process host for your WCF services. WAS enables you to efficiently uses the resources on your machine since it is message based activation, rather than requiring a Windows Service permanently available. An added capability of Dublin is that it provides Autostart of WAS hosted WCF services, meaning that it starts, or "warms up" the services in advance of the first message being received, thereby reducing the latency on first message call.

If would be good to understand whether WAS could also be suitable host for your WCF service and any limitations that you are currently running into (other than OS platform)

Thanks. Mark Fussell
Dublin PM 

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Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

Answer 2

...
Dublin uses IIS Manager extensions to provide a tooling story to manage and monitor WCF and WF applications, identical to ASP.NET IIS Manager extensions. When is comes to hosting services you do not need IIS, just WAS (Windows process Activation Service) installed as the process host for your WCF services. WAS enables you to ...

Hi Mark,
The "you do not need IIS, just WAS" is the exact problem I'm trying to solve right now. I have an almost identical scenario to the one Ed describes. I'm investigating moving away from windows services where WAS seems more appropriate. I don't want to run IIS and don't need http. Right now, all I need is named pipe, hosted in WAS without IIS. So, can you please tell me how that is accomplished or point me to a reference.
Thanks,
Shamus

Answer 3

It would be good to understand your reason for using Windows Services to host your WCF services.

It's self hosted as windows services because it's using a nettcptransport and IIS in Win 2000 (as it was) and even now in W2K3 only supports an HTTP transport as far as I'm aware. I described them as app servers which was probably miss-leading. They are business logic servers hosting services for the presentaiton servers to call. It's one windows service hosting approx 170 services in per-call instance management. It's all stateless, where we have state requirements we puch to the DB.

There are plans to move to W2K8, but the timeframe isn't confirmed.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, the upgrade route would be

1.Move to W2k8
2.Install WAS
3.Move from hosting using a windows service to hosting under WAS
4.Use Dublin to monitor the services hosted under WAS

First mistake I made was in thinking Dublin was a host rather than providing monitoring of already hosted services.

Odd that on msdn the steps for hosting a wcf service in WAS includes:

>> Step 6: Place the Service.svc file in your IIS virtual directory

I'm going to have to look over Dublins features a but more

Thanks

Ed




 

Answer 4

It can be done! Thanks to everyone that offered assistance. I pieced this together with the help of several people in several forums over the last couple of weeks. I posted the short version of what I did to finally make it work at WAS hosting without IIS.

Answer 5

Sorry, did not mean to propose this as answer to original question.

Answer 6

Thanks for posting this, Shamus, I'm sure this will help a few folks out in the future.

Ed