Sending messages to WCF host process

Question

I have a Console application hosting a WCF service. I would like to be able to fire an event from a method in the WCF service and handle the event in the hosting process of the WCF service. Is this possible? How would I do this? Could I derive a custom class from ServiceHost?

Answer 1

You don't need to inherit from ServiceHost. There are other approaches to your problem.

You can pass an instance of the service class, instead of a type to ServiceHost. Thus, you can create the instance before you start the ServiceHost, and add your own event handlers to any events it exposes.

Here's some sample code:

MyService svc = new MyService();
svc.SomeEvent += new MyEventDelegate(this.OnSomeEvent);
ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(svc);
host.Open();

There are some caveats when using this approach, as described in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms585487.aspx

Or you could have a well-known singleton class, that your service instances know about and explicitly call its methods when events happen.