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Understanding WCF Addresses

Once the contracts and bindings have been established, the final piece of the puzzle is to specify an

address for the WCF service. This is obviously quite important, in that remote callers will be unable

to communicate with the remote types if they cannot locate them! Like most aspects of WCF, an

address can be hard-coded in an assembly (via the System.Uri type) or offloaded to a *.config file.

In either case, the exact format of the WCF address will differ based on your choice of binding

(HTTP based, named pipes, TCP based, or MSMQ based). From a high level, WCF addresses can

specify the following bits of information:

• Scheme: The transport protocol (HTTP, etc.).

• MachineName: Fully qualified domain of the machine.

• Port: This is optional in many cases. For example, the default for HTTP bindings is port 80.

• Path: The path to the WCF service. 

This information can be represented by the following generalized template (the Port value is

optional, as some bindings make no use of them):

scheme://[:Port]/Path

When you are using a web service–based binding (basicHttpBinding, wsHttpBinding,

wsDualHttpBinding, or wsFederationHttpBinding), the address breaks down as so (recall that if

you do not specify a port number, HTTP-based protocols will default to port 80):

http://localhost:8080/MyWCFService