C# – call a method in a Self-Hosted WCF Service locally

cnetservicehostwcf

I have a WCF Service contract which is basically the Publish Subscriber pattern.

The WCF Service is hosted inside the Windows Service that I want to publish from. The Clients subscribe to messages and when the Windows Service does something it publishes to all clients.

To host the service I have declared a ServiceHost class and the Contract Class has a method which is not flagged in the Interface but is implemented in the Class to publish.

I want to be able to call this method locally (not going through WCF) which then publishes the message via Callbacks.

I can't seem to get from ServiceHost to the instance of the Contract Class.

Is this possible and if so how? I know the work around is to have a client built into the service as well, but it seems a bit strange creating a client to connect to itself.

Thanks in advance

DJIDave

app.config

<system.serviceModel>
    <services>
      <service behaviorConfiguration="Processor.Wcf.ServiceBehavior"
        name="Processor.Wcf.ProcessorService">
        <endpoint address="net.tcp://localhost:9000/processor/service"
              binding="netTcpBinding" name="procService"
              bindingConfiguration="netTcpBindingConfig"
              contract="Processor.Wcf.IProcessorService"/>
        <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
          <host>
            <baseAddresses>
              <add baseAddress="http://localhost:8732/Design_Time_Addresses/Processor.Wcf/Service1/" />
            </baseAddresses>
          </host>
      </service>
    </services>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="Processor.Wcf.ServiceBehavior">
          <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, 
          set the value below to false and remove the metadata endpoint above before deployment -->
          <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="True"/>
          <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, 
          set the value below to true.  Set to false before deployment 
          to avoid disclosing exception information -->
          <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="False" />
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <bindings>
      <netTcpBinding>
        <binding name="netTcpBindingConfig"
                 closeTimeout="00:01:00"
                 openTimeout="00:01:00"
                 receiveTimeout="00:10:00"
                 sendTimeout="00:01:00"
                 transactionFlow="false"
                 transferMode="Buffered"
                 transactionProtocol="OleTransactions"
                 hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard"
                 listenBacklog="10"
                 maxBufferPoolSize="524288"
                 maxBufferSize="65536"
                 maxConnections="10"
                 maxReceivedMessageSize="65536">
          <readerQuotas maxDepth="32"
                        maxStringContentLength="8192"
                        maxArrayLength="16384"
                        maxBytesPerRead="4096"
                        maxNameTableCharCount="16384" />
          <reliableSession ordered="true"
                           inactivityTimeout="00:10:00"
                           enabled="false" />
          <security mode="Transport">
            <transport clientCredentialType="Windows" protectionLevel="EncryptAndSign" />
          </security>
        </binding>
      </netTcpBinding>
    </bindings>

  </system.serviceModel>

Best Answer

Unless you provide the service instance reference to the ServiceHost as a constructor parameter, there isn't a way to have the ServiceHost provide you an service instance reference. If you do provide that instance reference then you are creating a singleton service which is generally not a good idea.

To keep the service as it is configured, you will have to call it through a client. This is actually easier than you might think. Since your host code has access to the service contract, you can use it with the ChannelFactory class to get a proxy for the service. Besides the service contract, all you have to provide is the endpoint name and ChannelFactory will do the rest. Below is an example of how to do this:

private IMyServiceContract GetLocalClient(string serviceEndpointName)
{
    var factory = new ChannelFactory<IMyServiceContract>(serviceEndpointName);
    return factory.CreateChannel();
}

UPDATE: Along with this approach, you should consider having you service expose a NetNamedPipeBinding endpoint to improve performance. This binding pretty much does everything in memory and is the fastest binding for same machine service invocation.

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