WCF Hosting Options Suggestion

Question

I am looking for suggestion for hosting my WCF enterprise application.

The app. require to run without stopping at the server. It also use TCP to yield the best performance at the intranet environment.

I am thinking to host it at window service because IIS recycle process, and has timeout.

However, I find this from the msdn http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649818.aspx :

Window service...Lack of enterprise features. Windows services do not have the security, manageability, scalability, and administrative features that are included in IIS.

Does it mean Window Service is not suitable for enterprise application? But How about MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL etc. They all host at Win. Service right?

Regards Bryan

Answer 1

Windows service is suitable for enterprise application! The quoted text actually means that IIS has a lot of built-in management features which are not available in custom hosting (like windows service) unless you implement them at your own.

One of such features is the recycling you want to avoid which helps application to keep low resource consumption (server is in healthy state). Another such feature is IIS checking of the worker state. If worker process looks stuck (don't process requests for any reason), IIS will start automatically another process and routes new requests to that process.

IIS + WAS + AppFabric can provide very big feature set but they are not good for every scenario. If you have service which requires some background continuous, scheduled or multi threaded processing it is probably better to move to self hosted scenario.