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Establishing the ABCs Within an App.config File

When you are building a host for a WCF service type, you will follow a very predictable set of steps—

some via configuration and some via code:

1.

Define the endpoint for the WCF service being hosted within the host’s configuration file. 

2.

Programmatically make use of the ServiceHost type to expose the service types available

from this endpoint.

3.

Ensure the host remains running to service incoming client requests. Obviously, this step is

not required if you are hosting your service types using a Windows service or IIS.

In the world of WCF, the term “endpoint” simply represents the address, binding, and contract

rolled together in a nice tidy package. In XML, an endpoint is expressed using the 

element and the address, binding, and contract elements. Update your *.config file to specify a

single endpoint (reachable via port 8080) exposed by this host:

binding="basicHttpBinding"

contract="MagicEightBallServiceLib.IEightBall"/>

Notice that the  element is the root for all of a host’s WCF settings. Each

service exposed by the host is represented by a  element, wrapped within the 

base element. Here, our single  element makes use of the (optional) name attribute to spec-

ify the friendly name of the service type. 

The nested  element handles the task of defining the address, the binding model

(basicHttpBinding in this example), and the fully qualified name of the interface type defining the

WCF service contract (IEightBall). Because we are using an HTTP-based binding, we make use of

the http:// scheme, specifying an arbitrary port ID.