Journey to robust web services: configuring your WCF web service

WCF comes with a bunch of handy configuration tools.  You can find an introduction to them on the WCF configuration tools page on MSDN. Once you've created your WCF service project in Visual Studio, you'll need to use these tools to configure the service beyond a simple and basic test environment (which uses a Basic HTTP binding by default).

The specific tool mentioned on this page that you'll want to use is the Service Configuration Editor (svcconfigeditor.exe). This tool is used to edit Web.config files for WCF services. It comes with a handy wizard for adding a new service. When using this wizard, I ran into an error message similar to the following when trying to select the assembly I built containing my service: "Could not load assembly. This assembly is built by a newer runtime than the currently loaded runtime and cannot be loaded.". To solve this, I had to go and change the application configuration file for the program ("svcconfigeditor.exe.config" in the same directory as the program). I added the following under the root 'configuration' element:

 <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true">
  <supportedRuntime version="v2.0" />
  <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/>
 </startup>

This will allow the program to run using your currently installed framework (mine happened to be 4.0).