How do I pass values to the constructor on my wcf service?

Question

I would like to pass values into the constructor on the class that implements my service.

However ServiceHost only lets me pass in the name of the type to create,

Answer 1

You can simply create and instance of your Service and pass that instance to the ServiceHost object. The only thing you have to do is to add a [ServiceBehaviour] attribute for your service and mark all returned objects with [DataContract] attribute.

Here is a mock up:

namespace Service
{
    [ServiceContract]
    [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)]
    public class MyService
    {
        private readonly IDependency _dep;

        public MyService(IDependency dep)
        {
            _dep = dep;
        }

        public MyDataObject GetData()
        {
            return _dep.GetData();
        }
    }

    [DataContract]
    public class MyDataObject
    {
        public MyDataObject(string name)
        {
            Name = name;
        }

        public string Name { get; private set; }
    }

    public interface IDependency
    {
        MyDataObject GetData();
    }
}

and the usage:

var dep = new Dependecy();
var myService = new MyService(dep);
var host = new ServiceHost(myService);

host.Open();

I hope this will make life easier for someone.