Learning WCF

Choosing the Right Hosting Environment

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, choosing a hosting environment for your services is something that is largely driven by your operating platform and choice of protocol. Now that you’ve had a chance to explore the different hosting environments, you can probably guess that the best possible hosting environment would be the WAS for its rich set of features and protocol support. Unfortunately, WAS is available only on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 machines.

Table 4-4 summarizes the hosting options available to you on each operating platform, including client and server platforms. Based on this summary, here are the likely choices you’ll make for your production services on each server platform:

• For Windows Server 2003 machines, you’ll use IIS 6.0 for HTTP and Windows Services for other protocols.

• For Windows Server 2008 machines, you’ll use IIS 7.0/WAS.

Table 4-4. A summary of hosting options based on operating platform and communication protocol

Operating platform	Protocol	Hosting options
Windows XP/SP2	HTTP	IIS 5.1 or self-host
Â	Named pipes, TCP, MSMQ	Self-host
Windows Vista	HTTP, named pipes, TCP, MSMQ	IIS 7.0/WAS or self-host
Windows Server 2003	HTTP	IIS 6.0
Â	Named pipes, TCP, MSMQ	Self-host
Windows Server 2008	HTTP, named pipes, TCP, MSMQ	IIS 7.0/WAS or self-host

For client systems, the choice is a little bit more complex. In-process services introduce the least configuration overhead for clients; thus, you’ll be using Windows Forms or WPF clients as your self-hosting environment. If the system is a complex, distributed system where you have significant control over setup, you may install Windows services to provide services for Windows XP machines. For Windows Vista machines, your choice of self-hosting with Windows services or enabling WAS may be governed by client preferences.