Can I call a method in a Self-Hosted WCF Service locally?

Question

I have a WCF Service contract which is basically the Publish Subscriber pattern.

The WCF Service is hosted inside the Windows Service that I want to publish from. The Clients subscribe to messages and when the Windows Service does something it publishes to all clients.

To host the service I have declared a ServiceHost class and the Contract Class has a method which is not flagged in the Interface but is implemented in the Class to publish.

I want to be able to call this method locally (not going through WCF) which then publishes the message via Callbacks.

I can't seem to get from ServiceHost to the instance of the Contract Class.

Is this possible and if so how? I know the work around is to have a client built into the service as well, but it seems a bit strange creating a client to connect to itself.

Thanks in advance

DJIDave

app.config

<system.serviceModel>
    <services>
      <service behaviorConfiguration="Processor.Wcf.ServiceBehavior"
        name="Processor.Wcf.ProcessorService">
        <endpoint address="net.tcp://localhost:9000/processor/service"
              binding="netTcpBinding" name="procService"
              bindingConfiguration="netTcpBindingConfig"
              contract="Processor.Wcf.IProcessorService"/>
        <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
          <host>
            <baseAddresses>
              <add baseAddress="http://localhost:8732/Design_Time_Addresses/Processor.Wcf/Service1/" />
            </baseAddresses>
          </host>
      </service>
    </services>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="Processor.Wcf.ServiceBehavior">
          <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, 
          set the value below to false and remove the metadata endpoint above before deployment -->
          <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="True"/>
          <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, 
          set the value below to true.  Set to false before deployment 
          to avoid disclosing exception information -->
          <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="False" />
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <bindings>
      <netTcpBinding>
        <binding name="netTcpBindingConfig"
                 closeTimeout="00:01:00"
                 openTimeout="00:01:00"
                 receiveTimeout="00:10:00"
                 sendTimeout="00:01:00"
                 transactionFlow="false"
                 transferMode="Buffered"
                 transactionProtocol="OleTransactions"
                 hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard"
                 listenBacklog="10"
                 maxBufferPoolSize="524288"
                 maxBufferSize="65536"
                 maxConnections="10"
                 maxReceivedMessageSize="65536">
          <readerQuotas maxDepth="32"
                        maxStringContentLength="8192"
                        maxArrayLength="16384"
                        maxBytesPerRead="4096"
                        maxNameTableCharCount="16384" />
          <reliableSession ordered="true"
                           inactivityTimeout="00:10:00"
                           enabled="false" />
          <security mode="Transport">
            <transport clientCredentialType="Windows" protectionLevel="EncryptAndSign" />
          </security>
        </binding>
      </netTcpBinding>
    </bindings>

  </system.serviceModel>

Answer 1

Old question, but here is another way to call a Singleton WCF Service hosted on a Windows Service

Following @Ben's requirements, the Service would need to be forced to be a Singleton:

[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)] 

Then:

var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService), myUri);
var instance = (MyService)host.SingletonInstance;

That's it. Basically, the host already has a property that needs to be 'casted' to be able to access all the features from the Service.

Answer 2

Unless you provide the service instance reference to the ServiceHost as a constructor parameter,

This line from Sixto's solution solved things for me. Credit and thanks to this post as well.

I'm using a duplex binding at the moment.

---

The key concept is that you can pass in a Type or an instance to the ServiceHost constructor.

So what I had before was:

 ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService), myUri);

What I needed was:

 MyService service = new MyService(foo);  // Can now pass a parameter
 ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(service, myUri);

Also, I needed to mark MyService with

[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)] 

...and now I can call the host's methods from inside the service.

However, keep in mind that the instance you created will not have an OperationContext if you call its methods directly: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15270541/385273

Good luck!