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?

Accepted Answer

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.

Sending messages to WCF host process

Solution

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