It sounds like it should be trivial: Create a WCF web library and host it in IIS. Surely lots of people need to do this, and it will be easy in a fairly modern version of Visual Studio like 2012? Previously I have created this article about how to host WCF Service in IIS 8, however I will explain more details in this article.

Whatever the reason, I hope this page will offer a useful step-by-step guide to set up a WCF Service Library project to be run from its development folder on Windows 8.0 or Windows 2012, IIS 8.0 – and I have been using VS 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 as the target.  Also, before I begin, and something of a spoiler alert; you may prefer to publish your website to a specific location, and host it in IIS from there, rather than try and host it from your development folder.  This option is covered after the walk-through below.

Please Make Sure that You Have Integrated your ASP.NET with IIS

The easiest way to check this is to create a minimalistic web application (e.g. ASP.NET MVC with “No Authentication”) and try to host it in IIS (see configuration steps below). If something is missing, make sure that:

• “Internet Information Services” and “Word Wide Web Services” are enabled in the “Turn Windows Features on or off” dialog.
• If IIS is up and running, but the ASP.NET integration is missing (you can check the ISAPI filters in IIS Manager), you should run “%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe –i” and hope for the best (maybe restart the machine afterwards).

Take a look at WCF Service

I assume that you have created WCF service called “WCF Service Application”. Hosting this application in IIS means that you create a virtual directory in IIS, where you link the root folder of your project to a URL. You also need to specify an app pool to be used, which should match to the .NET framework you target (e.g. “.NET v4.5”).

If you have configured your.svc files within the specified URL, you should see a page with some positive messages and links to the WSDL contracts. If you see this, then stop reading, you are done.

However, you can receive an error page, “HTTP Error 404.17 – Not Found”, “The requested content appears to be script and will not be served by the static file handler.”. This most probably means that your IIS is not configured to host WCF services (this seems to be the default).

With .NET 3.5, you had to run the “ServiceModelReg.exe” tool, but this doesn’t seem to be necessary anymore for .NET 4.0+ (“aspnet_regiis” does this already). If you look into the details of the IIS settings, you can see some references to WCF.

The only thing you have to do is to enable “HTTP Activation” in the “Turn Windows Features on or off” dialog under the “WCF Services” node. With this, you basically enable the creation of WCF service instances to serve requests coming through HTTP.

Then, please test it again and you wont see any error message anymore.

I hope this article will help you a lot.

Today post will cover about one of IIS 8 new feature. It is called Application Initialization module. Activating it allows you to enable the following capabilities:

• Starting a worker process without waiting for a request (AlwaysRunning)
• Load the application without waiting for a request (preloadEnabled)
• Show a loading page while the application is starting

To enable these features

1. Set the startMode on the application pool  to AlwaysRunning.

    <system.applicationHost>    
     <applicationPools>      
      <add name="DefaultAppPool" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" />    
     </applicationPools>  
    </system.applicationHost> 

2. Set preloadEnabled to true on the web application.

    <system.applicationHost>    
     <sites>      
      <site name="Default Web Site" id="1">        
       <application path="/">          
        <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot" />        
       </application>        
       <application name="AppInit" applicationPool="DefaultAppPool" preloadEnabled="true">          
        <virtualDirectory path="/AppInit" physicalPath="c:\inetpub\wwwroot\appinit" />       
        </application>      
      </site>    
     </sites>  
    </system.applicationHost> 

Changing the startMode to AlwaysRunning will start the application pool and initialize your application the moment your IIS server is (re)started. So users that visit your site don’t have to wait because the worker process is already started.

By setting preloadEnabled to true, it starts loading the application within that worker process without waiting for a request.

Are you getting the following error when configuring the IIS8 connector for CF10 on Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8?

"Version 8.0 is installed. Supported versions are 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7x"

We have some additional guidance that should help you work around it.

1) Please make sure that you are using correct Windows 2012 Server/Windows 8 supported ColdFusion 10 installer (The updated full ColdFusion 10 Installers)

MD5s of the full installer should be as follows:

For Win 64-bit MD5 --> ef74d583a8d069c7138a4ea8da9c5359

For Win 32-Bit MD5 --> ca9363a0a3817533436238b477b88792

2) You can opt to configure IIS 8 while installing or after installation.

     Installer has in-built support for IIS 8 on Win 8/Win 2012.

3) By all means install the latest CF10 updates, but do not apply updates older than Update 8. If you apply any of the older updates like update 7 or 6, you will likely see the following error while trying to run the IIS 8 web server connector:

"Version 8.0 is installed. Supported versions are 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7x" 

4) If all the above steps have been followed and if you are still getting the error, please verify that update 8 is installed properly by checking the log file under \cfusion\hf-updates\hf-10- 00008\Adobe_ColdFusion_10_Update_8*.log

And MD5  of the connector jar located at <CF10_Install_Home>\cfusion\runtime\lib\wsconfig.jar should be

     a) If you have applied Update 8 -> ba8f8c8bcd34c266faa0031107bbf948.

     b) If you have NOT applied any Updates -> 35cc2f630325506081f3b29d41e50c3c