Open Source WCF Generic Hosting Service
Posted by johann | Filed under Software
Every now and then I meet people that keep impressing me by being able to not just talk the talk but walk the walk as well. One such person is the Senior Architect at our company who released one of his many cool little projects on CodePlex a few weeks ago.
Before getting into the functionality, it surely has made my life easier as my team of Engineers need not dig into any WCF intricacies or mundane tasks such as logging and tracing because it provides native and configurable tracing and logging services by leveraging the Microsoft Logging Application Blocks.
What is the Generic WCF Hosting Service?
A short introduction as to what it is from the CodePlex site:
“The Generic Host Service provides a declarative service registration mechanism using the application configuration file, support for xcopy deployment of new services, support for hosting multiple WCF Services within a single Service Host instance, logging and tracing through Microsoft Logging Application Blocks, and isolation between executing services through App Domains.”
Why do you want to use it?
It provides for an interface that acts as a Service Manager for the services hosted in the Generic Host Service allowing you to Start, Stop, Restart, and Enumerate service.
Have you ever wanted to hot swap services? Now you can. A dll that implements a service can be replaced even while the service is still running. A call to Restart for the instance of that service will then unload the old instance and load the new one. How cool is that.
I need to play around with some of the other features and hope to see the next version which I know there are already some enhancements made for. You can get the code and the compiled service on CodePlex.
Intellectual Athletic ex-pat South African American Vegetarian Techie who loves his wife, parents and all creatures regardless of their current state of delusion.