Service has zero application (non-infrastructure) endpoints

Question

I recently created a WCF service (dll) and a service host (exe). I know my WCF service is working correctly since I am able to successfully add the service to WcfTestClient.

Answer 1

One thing to think about is: Do you have your WCF completely uncoupled from the WindowsService (WS)? A WS is painful because you don't have a lot of control or visibility to them. I try to mitigate this by having all of my non-WS stuff in their own classes so they can be tested independently of the host WS. Using this approach might help you eliminate anything that is happening with the WS runtime vs. your service in particular.

John is likely correct that it is a .config file problem. WCF will always look for the execution context .config. So if you are hosting your WCF in different execution contexts (that is, test with a console application, and deploy with a WS), you need to make sure you have WCF configuration data moved over to the proper .config file. But the underlying issue to me is that you don't know what the problem is because the WS goo gets in the way. If you haven't refactored to that yet so that you can run your service in any context (that is, unit test or console), then I'd sugget doing so. If you spun your service up in a unit test, it would likely fail the same way that you are seeing with the WS which is much easier to debug rather than attempting to do so with the yucky WS plumbing.

Answer 2

I had this error in a Windows Service when my WCF Service Library that I created was not connected for hosting, but was connected for connection. I was missing an endpoint. (I wanted both connection and hosting in my Windows Service so that I could serve up the WCF Service to other connections, as well as have the main process of my Windows Service use it as well to do various tasks on a timer/schedule.)

The fix was that I rightlcicked my App.config file and chose Edit WCF Configuration. Then, I did the steps for Create Service so that I could connect to my WCF Service. Now I had two endpoints in my App.config, not just one. One endpoint was for the connection to the WCF Service Library, and another was for the hosting of it.

Answer 3

This error will occur if the configuration file of the hosting application of your WCF service does not have the proper configuration.

Remember this comment from configuration:

When deploying the service library project, the content of the config file must be added to the host's app.config file. System.Configuration does not support config files for libraries.

If you have a WCF Service hosted in IIS, during runtime via VS.NET it will read the app.config of the service library project, but read the host's web.config once deployed. If web.config does not have the identical <system.serviceModel> configuration you will receive this error. Make sure to copy over the configuration from app.config once it has been perfected.

Answer 4

Just copy the App.config file from the service project to the console host application and paste here and then delete it from the service project.