IIS 7.0 and Windows Activation Service
On Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 machines you can host your WCF services with Windows Activation Service (WAS). WAS is a process activation service installed with IIS 7.0 that decouples the activation architecture from IIS in order to support non-HTTP protocols such as named pipes, TCP, and MSMQ. Like IIS 6.0, WAS also provides features for idle-time management, health monitoring, process recycling, and management tools for configuring application pools among other things. Although supported by Windows Vista, hosting in the WAS is not incredibly useful for client deployments.
In this section, I’ll explain how WAS hosting works, show you how the hosting architecture compares to IIS 6.0 hosting, and provide you with some tips for getting started with the WAS.
WAS Hosting Architecture
IIS 7.0 introduces some architectural changes necessary to expand support for named pipes, TCP, and MSMQ protocols. The new architecture relies on protocol listeners, listener adapters and protocol handlers to process requests.
- Protocol listeners
A protocol listener is responsible for receiving requests for a particular protocol. There is a protocol listener provided for HTTP, named pipes, TCP, and MSMQ. For HTTP, the listener is http.sys (same as IIS 6.0). Listeners for other protocols are provided by their respective listener adapter service.
- Listener adapters
A listener adapter is responsible for bridging requests between the WAS and the ASP.NET worker process ...
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