Previously I gave a simple overview of hosting a single services in a form. If you’re developing a larger system and you have broken down business across several services, for reasons ranging from code management, to partitioning development tasks across teams, to reducing the compile time for a visual studio solution. You’re likely to want to keep the services separate but kick them off in groups; “Core System Services”, “Supporting Services”, “Reporting/Administration Services”, etc.

The most manual part is to merge the endpoints from all your individual config files into 1 single App.Config file that will accompany your production level deployment approach. This can also be used to package up the initial services mid-way through development when they are unlikely to change and it saves hassle running them as a group.

Watch-out-for: the contract definition in the config file; make sure it’s a fully qualified namespace for each service end point. You add individual references to your host application for each service you’re including.

<endpoint  
  address="net.tcp://localhost:8001/Patients"  
  binding="netTcpBinding"  
  bindingConfiguration="myNetTcpBinding"
  contract="Server.Patient.IPatientServiceContract" 
 />

For this example I’ve simply chosen to run it as a standard windows service, where all I need to do is implement OnStart() and OnStop() and if you think you need to OnPause() and OnContinue() or any of the other ServiceBase methods.

public partial class MultiServiceHost : ServiceBase
{
   private IList<ServiceHost> hosts = new List<ServiceHost>();
}

The OnStart() is simply a list of each of your services you’re grouping to run together.

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
   try
   {
      hosts.Add(new ServiceHost(typeof(PatientService)));
      hosts.Add(new ServiceHost(typeof(MedicalProcedureService)));
      hosts.Add(new ServiceHost(typeof(OtherService)));
      //more hosts...
      StartServices();
   }
   //Catch ()...
}

A loop to kick off all the services, that’s called after they’re all added.

private void StartServices()
{
   foreach (ServiceHost h in hosts)
   {   h.Open();   }
}

Closing them all off upon shutdown of the host.

protected override void OnStop()
{
   foreach (ServiceHost host in _hosts)
   {
      if (host != null)
         host.Close();
   }
}

It’s that simple.