Using Ninject in an IIS-hosted environment to create a WCF service instance that's in a shared assembly (i.e. not the web application assembly)

Recently I wanted to create several WCF services for some of our internal applications and host these services in multiple different servers. There'd be no difference in the code between the locations where they'd be hosted. In order to avoid code duplication, I wanted to make these WCF services common and then just host them in the IIS applications. However, it's not as simple as creating a new (shared) assembly, creating the WCF service in that assembly and then sharing it between the different services. When I tried this, I ran into the problem where even though I specified the service in the config section:

<system.serviceModel>

         ....

</system.serviceModel> 

 

... it still wouldn't find my service and load it (I'm using Ninject as a dependency injection container for my WCF services).  They key to getting the shared services to be found and loaded properly was to create a .svc file in each of the services where the WCF services were shared, and it looked something like this in each case:

<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="false" Service="MyWcfSharedServices.MySharedWebService" Factory="Ninject.Extensions.Wcf.NinjectServiceHostFactory" %>

After adding the .svc file and using the path to it in the system.serviceModel configuration in the configuration file, everything worked perfectly.