So I'm designing a WCF service. I'm unexperienced with WCF, and I'm trying to decide whether it should be hosted in IIS, or a custom Windows service.. Or some other option?

Things to consider:

  • It needs to load data from a database on startup.
  • It needs to maintain this data across requests, not load it each time.
  • It needs to process multiple requests simultaneously.
  • It needs to be as configurable as possible regarding endpoints.
  • It will be calling native dlls quite a lot.

I suspect hosting it in IIS would simplify certain things, but I'm not sure it would be a good idea in this situation.

What are my options, and what are their pros and cons?

.net wcf iis windows-services
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