Tip of the day #2: Problem with your WCF hosting? Probably an ABC matter!
Today I faced a nice little issue. It wasn’t something mindblasting and the solution wasn’t somehow innovative, but rather a 5-minute issue to resolve (If I had said the ABC out loud first). Instead it was a 30 minutes work. I was asked to make a new WCF web service to provide some functionality for our business case. Some structural background on the project I was working on: It is a Silverlight application, with client-side data management UI, a server-side with (web) services supporting our business logic and a LOT of (disconnected) business objects flying around like crazy, between the web application and the client. This orchestration was ment to be disturbed until today, by me, creating two more WSs’, the first for a certain operation taking place server-side and a second, stand alone, little web service doing some stuff at a third tier in another machine (which is used by the former). I spent more than 30 minutes in the morning (before coffee) asking myself what have I done wrong, and the client (first WS) didn’t recognize my configuration elements. The same dialog between the debbuger again and again, under various tweakings…
-Visual Studio says: Sorry, I cannot find default endpoint element that references contract IService******* in the ServiceModel client configuration section.
-Aggelos says: I am going by the book, what is wrong?
-Visual Studio says: Hahahaha, lolz, think again, you happy programer!
What was going wrong? Go back to the beginning, and remember. All the server functionality is supported by a certain web application with it’s own web config. My web service (the client one) had it’s own project under a WCF service library project. The WCF was hosted by the Web Application so… yeah that’s the answer. The configuration resides in web.config of course, even if the WCF (library) is somewhere else…
ABC stands for Address, Binding, Contract…missing one of them, breaks all of them… what about missing all of them? :P:P:P:P:P
