Webfarm and Servername

If your WCf service is hosted with a commercial hosting provider which may or many not be using a web farm, you may find that when you browse to your service that it shows a different address for the svcutil.exe than the dns address and when you download the wsdl/svcutil that this wsdl/svcutil is referencing the internal server name instead of your domain name.

For example, if you purchased a domain name called aliayman.com and your hosting company is storing and hosting your files on an internal server called HostingCompanyServer01. Now let's imagine you created a web service called MyService.svc.

Now when you browse to http://aliayman.com/MyService.svc

you will see your service information but you will notice the line that contain the svcutil.exe is telling you to get the wsdl from

svcutil.exe http://HostingCompanyServer01/Myservice.svc

this is a problem because you can not access this server name, you can access aliayman.com but you can not access this specific host name.

Also, when you try to reference this service in your code you will find that your reference is pointing to HostingCompanyServer01 instead of aliayman.com

You have to solutions to this problem.

Solution 1: after you create the reference search your code for HostingCompanyServer01 and change it to aliayman.com and at least your program will be able to deal with the web service. You will find HostingCompanyServer01 in *.wsdl and *.svcinfo files.

Solution 2: which is the best solution is to change the binding of the IIS installed on HostingCompanyServer01. This is off course if you have access to this IIS. to view the binding find your site identifier number (let's assume it is 1) and issue these commands to view your binding. (notice your site identifier 1 is used before ServerBinding and SecureBinding below)

cscript.exe //nologo %systemdrive%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs get W3SVC/1/ServerBindings

cscript.exe //nologo %systemdrive%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs get W3SVC/1/SecureBindings

then issue these commands to correct the binding

cscript.exe //nologo %systemdrive%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/1/ServerBindings "80:aliayman.com"

cscript.exe //nologo %systemdrive%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/1/SecureBindings "443:aliayman.com"

Then restart your application pool

I found these advices about the binding in this blog post

http://gavinmckay.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/howto-fix-wcf-host-name-on-iis/