Thanks to those of you that have sent me comments on my CustomHostFactory post. I wanted to post publicly question that I received from a couple of people.

While specifying a hard coded BaseAddress array works, it's not really practice for deploying applications in multiple environments and updating configuration changes in the future. I set out to find a better approach to this, and found a blog post by Aaron Skonnard here that add a simple configuration capability by reading the following section of a web.config file.

  <appSettings>
    <add key ="baseHttpAddress" value=http://localhost/ServiceTest/service.svc/>
  </appSettings>

My updated CustomHostFactory code is as follows

    using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Text;
    using System.ServiceModel;
    using System.ServiceModel.Activation;
    using System.Configuration;

    class CustomHostFactory : ServiceHostFactory 
    {
        protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses)
        {
            CustomHost customServiceHost =
                new TradeServiceCustomHost(serviceType, baseAddresses);
            return customServiceHost;
        }
    }

    class CustomHost : ServiceHost
    {
        public CustomHost(Type serviceType, params Uri[] baseAddresses)
            : base(serviceType, GetBaseAddresses())
        { }
        protected override void ApplyConfiguration()
        {
            base.ApplyConfiguration();
        }

        // read base addresses from AppSettings in config
        // Added from sample at http://pluralsight.com/blogs/aaron/archive/2006/04/19/22106.aspx
        private static Uri[] GetBaseAddresses()
        {
            List<Uri> addresses = new List<Uri>();
            AddBaseAddress(addresses, "baseHttpAddress");
            return addresses.ToArray();
        }
        private static void AddBaseAddress(List<Uri> addresses, string key)
        {
            string address = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key];
            if (null != address)
                addresses.Add(new Uri(address));
        }
    }

It would be really great if there was a way to remove base address through the web.config similar to how asp.net lets you remove providers and other settings with something to the effect of

<BaseAddresses>
    <Remove All />
    <Add BaseAddress="http;//..." />
</BaseAddresses>

Posted in wcf  | Comments [2]