As you are probably aware, the Windows Communication Foundation runtime cares little about the process that is hosting it. With the WCF COM+ Integration feature we take advantage of this to offer a “COM+ hosted” mode (see documentation for the other two).

This is really our optimal, low dependency case and I’ve attached a sample to demonstrate how to achieve this for a simple component.

The key points that this demonstrates are as follows:

  • The WCF services are hosted in-process with an unmodified Enterprise Services component – there is no cross-process communication to call into the component and the component is blissfully unaware that the communication is happening over web services
  • The app offers the same contract on TCP and HTTP endpoints simultaneously:
    • the HTTP binding (wsHttpBinding) provides a broadly interoperable binding and builds on http.sys infrastructure without any IIS dependency
    • the TCP binding (netTcpBinding) provides with fewer of the WS* standards (WS-ReliableMessaging is not required to establish a session) and uses an efficient transport with the WCF binary encoder
  • The app provides the familiar HTTP/HTML help page again hosted directly from the COM+ app

Full source and initial draft instructions are in the zip.

This will make its way into the SDK over time but for now, comments / suggestions / bug reports are certainly welcome.