Self-Hosting Your ADO.NET Data Services ("Astoria") Services

The official ADO.NET Data Services (hm, am I the only who thinks that this - again - is not a perfect name...?) documentation doesn't alk about and doesn't show how to self-host your Astoria services - the samples and quickstarts always use ASP.NET/IIS to expose the WCF-based services that Astoria is using.

By looking a bit around in Reflector I managed to create a self-hosted Astoria service which (for this example) is hosted in a Console application.

We have several steps to fulfill our task:

• Create the ADO.NET Entity Model
• Implement your Astoria Service
• Configure endpoint(s)
• Create a ServiceHost instance

Creating the Entity Data Model is no special thing as well as implementing an Astoria service. Just follow the offical steps for the respective topic in the ADO.NET Data Services Quickstart docs.

Astoria uses one generic universal contract for implementing the service base class. The service class you already built above is a derivate of WebDataService<T> and the WCF universal ServiceContract is Microsoft.Data.Web.IRequestHandler which can be found in the Microsoft.Data.Web assembly.

[ServiceContract]
public interface IRequestHandler
{
  [OperationContract]
  [WebInvoke(UriTemplate="*", Method="*")]
  Message ProcessRequestForMessage(Stream messageBody);
}

So everything we need to do now is to create an endpoint definition which uses these artifacts and leverages the webHttpBinding which was introduced in .NET 3.5

<system.serviceModel>
  <services>
    <service name="SelfHostedAstoria.WebDataService">       
      <endpoint
        address="http://localhost:7777/Services/Data/NW"
        binding="webHttpBinding"
        behaviorConfiguration="webHttp"
        contract="Microsoft.Data.Web.IRequestHandler" />
    </service>
  </services>
</system.serviceModel>

In order to actually expose our Astoria Service we need to hook up a ServiceHost instance. In our case we will use the WebServiceHost (living in System.ServiceModel.Web) which already takes care about setting up the needed behavior on all webHttpBinding-based endpoints.

WebServiceHost host = new WebServiceHost(typeof(WebDataService));
host.Open();
...

Easy! Now we have a self-hosted Astoria service.