Hosting and Consuming WCF Service from Same Process

Question

Can you become a client of a WCF Service from with the Process that is hosting the WCF Service? I have tried creating seperate App Domains within the same process and still no success. The service is confirmed to be available on Http, Net.TCP and Net.Pipe.

Thank you for any help!

Nat

Answer 1

You might try using IDesign's ServiceModelEx assembly which simplifies the process of creating an in-process client for a WCF service.

The assembly include an InProcFactory class which dynamically creates a Net.Pipe endpoint and a proxy for your service.

ServiceModelEx from IDesign.net

Answer 2

I had this same issue, even while using the InProcFactory from ServiceModelEx.

It turns out, as described here, you need to set the ServiceBehavior to not UseSynchronizationContext.

[ServiceBehavior(UseSynchronizationContext = false)]
public class MyService : IMyService {}

Answer 3

Yes. After hosting the WCF service, You have to call the method on the hosted service in a seperate thread.

Answer 4

I don't know what your particular problem was, but I was also having a problem using WCF services within the same process. My problem was that my application would hang for a minute upon calling the service from the client, and finally return with a timeout exception. I suppose this has something to do with a blocking call on the thread while waiting for a response from the server... which is a problem if the server is being blocked. I was using named pipes, I didn't try any of the other options.

Samson's suggestion above probably works, but I did it the other way. I created the service and listener via a thread instead of calling the hosted service on a thread. This seems to be working just fine.

Now for something a little off topic - Firestrand asked why you would want to do this from within your own application. I am creating a Windows service, and a separate WPF application UI for which it needs to communicate. However, debugging Windows services are kind of a pain, so much of the service work, including WCF calls, is going into a separate DLL which I can reference in the UI application while in "test" mode, which essentially just calls the startup routines that the actual Windows service would. This allows me to debug both the UI and the "simulated" service without attaching to processes, running multiple processes, etc. It seems to be working great. Once the UI and DLL are completed I will simply create the actual Windows service which is basically just a wrapper for the DLL, and then at least hide the test mode on the UI. Just thought I'd share in case someone else finds this approach may be helpful.