Confused by use of host name in WSDL file in C# Web Service

Question

I have created a WCF web service in C# deployed in a Windows Service EXE which is largely working the way I want. I am using it in a self-hosted manner (not within IIS).

In order to make a WSDL file available to the calling Java webservice, I added ServiceMetadataBehavior to the host creation. i.e:

ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService));
ServiceMetadataBehavior smb = new ServiceMetadataBehavior();
smb.HttpGetEnabled = true;
host.Description.Behaviors.Add(smb);
host.Open();

This all worked fine until I moved my service to another server with a different host name. When I connect to the WSDL (http://prod-server:55000/MyService?wsdl), I see that the host name of the development server is hard coded in the WSDL.

Here is a snippet of the WSDL as seen in a browser:

<wsdl:definitions name="MyService" targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/">
<wsdl:import namespace="MyProject.ServiceContracts" location="http://dev-server:55000/MyService?wsdl=wsdl0"/>
<wsdl:types/>

I have checked all of the C# code in the project, and the development server name is not hard coded anywhere.

In the App.config file, I have the following defined:

<system.serviceModel>
<services>
  <service name="MyService">
    <endpoint address="http://localhost:55000/MyService" binding="basicHttpBinding"
      bindingConfiguration="" contract="MyProject.ServiceContracts.IMyInterface" />
    <host>
      <baseAddresses>
        <add baseAddress="http://localhost:55000/MyService" />
      </baseAddresses>
    </host>
  </service>
</services>

I would expect that this would result in the localhost machine name being substituted, but it persists as the development box name on which the service was originally created / deployed. Am I mistaken?

I also looked into the possibility of explicitly specifying a path to my WSDL file, but from what I can deduce, this can only be done if hosting the service on IIS.

Lastly and purely out of curiosity, I wonder if an actual WSDL file actually gets created (a physical file on disk I mean) or is it dynamically rendered with each request?

Answer 1

It is created dynamically, not every call IIRC, but on first request to the metadata endpoint. I'm not sure why your seeing your DEV server name on the non-DEV machine, but, because you're specifying localhost only in your endpoint address it's going to resolve DNS using the primary network address for the server. You may want to consider adding the useRequestHeadersForMetadataAddress behavior to your config so that the DNS with which the service is accessed is actually used instead.