WCF - Service Configuration Editor

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) involves a lot of configuration apart from service coding. Configuring the WCF service is a tedious process also. In order to configure the WCF Services, we need to put our hand mostly on the web.config file where all the configuration elements resides. As a WCF service developer, I know it is little bit tedious process to configure an simple binding element in the configuration section.

In order to simplify (as much as possible) the configuration process, Microsoft provides a utility to configure the WCF service called “WCF Service Configuration Editor” that is available as a built-in utility with Visual Studio.

In this particular post, I’m going to explain how to use the WCF Service Configuration editor and how to set different end points with it. You can also find this article in my blog also.

Open WCF Configuration Editor

You can open the WCF Configuration Editor using the Visual Studio’s menu “Tools –> WCF Configuration Editor”. Otherwise, you can right click on the Web.config file and select “Edit WCF Configuration” on the context menu.

Create Binding

1. In the WCF Config Editor, select “Bindings” in the left “Configuration” tree view and click the “New Binding Configuration” link button.
   
   
   
   
2. It will open the “Create a new binding” dialog. In this, select the respective binding you want. For this example, I will go with “Basic Http Binding” option and then click “OK”.
   
   
   
   
3. WCF Config Editor will provide all the attributes in table format under the “Binding” tab. You can configure the attribute by setting the valid values. I have set the “Name” as “Sample Http Binding”.
   
   
   
   
4. If you select “Security” tab, security related attributes are populated in a table format. There, you can set the values related to security.
   
   

 

Create End Point

1. Select the "Endpoints” node in the “Configuration” tree view. Then, click “New Client Endpoint” link button.
   
   
   
   
2. Previously we had created “Basic Http Binding”, so we need to select the “binding” as “Basic Http Binding”.
   
   
   
   
3. For “Contract” attribute value, click the browse button and select the WCF service’s dll location. It will extract the Contract from the dll and put it there. Otherwise, you can manually set it.
   
   
4. Set the “Address” attribute as the web service location, that is the URL where WCF service was hosted.
   
   I have set the mandatory attribute alone in the above steps. There are lot of options will be available under the “Identity” tab. if you need any one of these you can set it.

So, we are good with our configuration. Just save it using “File –> Save”. As a result, the “Web.config” file will be updated with the values which we have configured just now.

 

As a whole, if you are going to configure some complex binding, at this time “WCF Configuration Editor” is really helpful!

Readers! I hope this article is helpful. Please let me know your thoughts as comments.