How to publish a Web Service from Visual Studio into IIS?
I have written a WCF web service in C#. I had originally self-hosted it and then decided to host it on IIS running locally on my PC. While the service is working, there are several aspects of the deployment process that I don't understand:
Firstly, the URL of this service when hosted in IIS does not correspond to what I specified in my web.config. I had specified "http://localhost:8000/MyServices/OrderService" there and this was used when I self-hosted. Now that I've deployed to IIS, the URL has become "http://localhost/MyServices/OrderService". Why is the URL not picked up from my config file?
Secondly, to host the Web Service, I created a new web site within IIS (in addition to the existing 'Default Web Site'). I set the physical path to c:\inetpub\wwwroot (no idea if this is correct) and left the other parameters as default. I then copied my /bin folder, my .svc file and my web.config to this folder. Is this the equivalent of a 'Virtual Directory'?
Finally, the service didn't work until (within IIS) I selected 'Convert to application'. Why is it necessary to select 'Convert to application'?
Can anyone explain what the correct procedure is to publish a simple web service from Visual Studio into IIS, or point me at some good documentation so I can understand the process?
****EDIT TO ORIGINAL***** Having spent more time looking into this, I have found the following:
- When I create a web site in IIS, I give it a physical directory of c:\inetpub\wwwroot....etc
- If I then "publish" from within Visual studio, all it's doing is copying all the required filed (like the /bin directory, web.config and .svc file) into the physical directory of the website i.e. - c:\inetpub\wwwroot...
You can perform the copy manually to the same affect.
- Lastly, with regard to the URL of my service not corresponding to the baseAddress section of my web.config file, this has been answered on stackoverflow previously.
The answer is that the baseAddress is completely ignored when hosting on IIS.
Answer
If using Visual Studio 2010 you can right-click on the project for the service, and select properties. Then select the Web tab. Under the Servers section you can configure the URL. There is also a button to create the virtual directory.