Why would you host the wcf service in a windows service?

Question

What would be the reasons why you want to host the wcf service in a Windows service and not in IIS?

Answer 1

One reason is that IIS6 only supports HTTP-based bindings. If you want to use TCP, MSMQ, etc., you need to place it in a separate program.

Answer 2

• When hosted on IIS, you are allowed to bind only one port to a base address on each website (assuming you cannot specify two bindings with different ports, since you can only use one port or endpoints that use different ports)
• You can use only one base address in IIS, the only way is to deploy several versions of the same project on different sites (yuck).
• The IIS process should ultimately be reworked, and when it does, it resets everything and restarts, which is a good long time from freeing up memory and freeing up captured resources, but when using singletones this can have a reduced effect depending on your code

[edit]: more points

• In the standard setup, your workflow always has 2 GB of virtual memory available (regardless of whether you have 1, 2 or 4 GB physical memory in the machine).

Answer 3

• Liberty. You, as a developer, do not need someone to manage the box
• Sometimes IIS6 is really just a brute force
• You use it as an intermediate communication channel
• You want to declare all bindings in the code. This is much less confusing and powerful than the xml configuration files that seem to be all the rage. I can’t imagine many scenarios where I would like a non-programmer to mess with bindings. The xml approach is great for prototypes and systems that need to be very dynamic, but overall I don't think this is a good idea.