WCF (hosting service in IIS) – machine name automattically being picked up by WCF rather than IP

iiswcf

So, I previously posted about my troubles in moving a working WCF service from my local machine to the development server. The problem was that when moving it over all of the references were by machine name rather than ip. Since i was not accessing it on the domain, I couldn't see the machine name and couldn't access the references. Here was my previous post (.NET WCF service references use server name rather than IP address causing issues when consuming).

I found a solution, but wanted to make sure that this is the proper solution to my issue. And also ask if anyone else had any other input? The solution was to change the IIS site binding. I found the solution at (http://blogs.msdn.com/wenlong/archive/2007/08/02/how-to-change-hostname-in-wsdl-of-an-iis-hosted-service.aspx). The only thing is that I may have to do this for every site as the application that i work with is not hosted and is a web-based solution installed at each site. So i'm possibly going to have to include a script in the build for each site.

I would think that I would be able to make this change in the .config file?

Best Answer

The right way to handle this is to set and explicit host-header in IIS for the Web Site instance. Now, assuming you've only got one host-header applied to the Web Site instance that should be all that you need. However, if you have multiple host-headers configured you will also need to explicitly tell WCF which host to expose itself via. This is done with the configuration element under the element to bind the service to that specific domain.