Flickr WCF Part II - Hosting WCF Components In-Process
This is Part Two in an on-going series of articles about WCF components, all centered around a simple component I created to talk to the Flickr api. You can find Part I here.
Now that we’ve hosted the Flickr WCF component in IIS, let’s take the same service definition and implementation and do something more interesting with them than just spitting out a list of URLs. It would be cool if we could see each of the pictures and cycle through them. And, so that I can point out a potential WCF gotcha, let’s do this in a WinForms application.
Let’s also host the component in process. In process components should always use named pipes. I’ve found that the easiest possible way to host a component in process is by using Juval Lowy’s ServiceModelEx library. You can download the library at this link. We’ll use his InProcFactory class which he describes in some detail on pages 60-63 of his WCF Bible, “Programming WCF Services.”
With InProcFactory all you need to do is to add references to the class libraries which contain your component’s contracts and implementation.
Read more…
