Programmatically configure and host WCF Service in IIS

Question 1

The class you want is Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.web.administration.servermanager(v=VS.90).aspx

It has methods for manipulating most aspects of IIS, for example, adding application pools and applications. for example, this code configures a new IIS application

//the name of the IIS AppPool you want to use for the application  - could be DefaultAppPool
string appPoolName = "MyAppPool";

//the name of the application (as it will appear in IIS manager)
string name = "MyWCFService";

//the physcial path of your application
string physicalPath = "C:\\wwwroot\mywcfservice";


using (ServerManager serverManager = new ServerManager())
    {
      Configuration config = serverManager.GetApplicationHostConfiguration();
      ConfigurationSection sitesSection = config.GetSection("system.applicationHost/sites");
      ConfigurationElementCollection sitesCollection = sitesSection.GetCollection();
      ConfigurationElement siteElement = sitesCollection[0]; 
      ConfigurationElementCollection siteCollection = siteElement.GetCollection();
      ConfigurationElement applicationElement = siteCollection.CreateElement("application");
      applicationElement["path"] = name;
      applicationElement["applicationPool"] = appPoolName;
      ConfigurationElementCollection applicationCollection = applicationElement.GetCollection();
      ConfigurationElement virtualDirectoryElement = applicationCollection.CreateElement("virtualDirectory");
      virtualDirectoryElement["path"] = @"/";
      virtualDirectoryElement["physicalPath"] = physicalPath;
      applicationCollection.Add(virtualDirectoryElement);
      siteCollection.Add(applicationElement);
      serverManager.CommitChanges();
    }

In general, the calss is just a thin wrapper around the IIS config file. You can understand it by looking at your exisiting file, or even by looking at what you have to do in IIS Manager to configure the service manually, then translating that into the resulting configuration changes.

You can do all (at least lots of) the the IIS configuration in this way (e.g. configure application throttling, enable authentication schemes etc.).

The WCF part of the configuration is just normal WCF. you can do it either in code or in configuration.

Question 2

What you are looking for is called Publish. You can find it from the right-click context menu on the WCF Service project. You can publish from there or create a package for publishing later or distributing it to a remote site. There are a lot of tutorials on the net.

If you have a specific question about this feature, feel free to ask.

Question 3

Have a look at msdeploy, a command line packaging and deployment tool: