Maurizio's blog 3.0

If you host a WCF service on a machine with UAC enabled, Vista or Win7 for example, you might run into a seemingly strange exception:

The reason is due to the fact that to host a WCF service you need to register its url, and this task requires administrator privileges, and this means as well that if you run Visual Studio as Administrator everything works fine, but what if you don’t have this possibility ? Or how to register an URL for it to work ?

If you follow the link mentioned in the error message you waste your time because the resulting link is too general for this specific error. I used this approach: I downloaded HttpNamespaceManager, a little and nice open source utility (not an official Microsoft tool), also provided with source code, that just does this, register an URL even assigning permissions to users.

After the URL registration your service will work fine.

Starting from WCF 4.0 it’s possible to use a default endpoint in absence of explicit configuration. This means that you can avoid to configure an explicit endpont because of a default mapping between protocol schema and bindings described in the configuration file machine.config.

Here is the default content of that mapping:

For example, in the case of presence of “http” in the protocol, it will be used the default binding “basicHttpBinding” without the need to configure an endpoint explicitly.

Now, to test this new feature all you need is to create a simple service without an explicit endpoints configuration and then read hits configuration such as the following example:

This code in .Net Framework 4.0 will work fine, while .Net 3.5 would have required the endpoint configuration

If it happens this strange and cryptic error in Visual Studio 2010 while compiling any project:

“The exec task needs a command to execute”

the reason is this: in any pre or post build event, there is a carriage return character to remove, because Visual Studio 2010 poorly digested the carriage return characters in ‘text editor pre-post build events.