Code Droppings

I have dabbled a little bit in WCF, but had always been under the impression that services which implement HTTP endpoints needed to be hosted in IIS. Not so! Apparently, the WCF runtime has its own web server built in. I just wrote a service which is hosted in a Windows Service, specified a WSHttpBinding, and WCF took care of the rest.

I am working on an ASP.NET web application which has mixed-mode C++/CLI dependencies that call out to pure unmanaged DLLs. A new requirement is a 64-bit version of the application (it runs fine on Win64 in a IIS 32-bit app pool, but since 32-bit mode is an all-or-nothing proposition, it was decided we need a true 64 bit app.) I ran into a problem getting the Visual Studio Web Deployment Project to compile my app. It seems that aspnet_compiler.exe loads all of the dependencies during compilation, and the 32 bit compiler cannot load the 64 bit images (you get a "bad image format" error.) This is true even on Win64 build machines that have the .NET Framework64 (and therefore the 64-bit aspnet_compiler.exe) After a bit of spelunking through the .wdproj, I found that a relatively simple change to the MSBUILD file shipped with the WD project will allow this to work out. It simply forces MSBUILD to use the 64 bit compiler if the $(Platform) variable is set to "x64" Here is...