Thursday, November 30, 2006

More stuff on WCF / IIS7 - IIS7 has got some funky new tracing features built in to diagnose failed requests. Again, this is not enabled by default; you need to go into "Turn Windows Features on or off" and select "Interet Information Services\World Wide Web Services\Health and Diagnostics\Tracing". Once done, you'll see a new entry in the IIS admin tool - select your web site and on the Actions pane you can now configure the failed request tracing. Enjoy!
Just been starting to play with WCF again, and was experimenting with the IIS activation. With IIS7 on Vista, I was getting a 404 error on my .svc file. Since I knew the file existed, I guessed this was probably down to the appropriate handlers not being installed, and since it's not one of the few types that get served as static pages, IIS returned a 404.

I quick poke around the new IIS admin screen showed this to be the case - no handlers were setup to serve .svc files. Turns out that in Vista, this is an optional component that is not installed by default. To get .svc files running, you need to go to Control Panel \ Programs, open the "Turn Windows features on or off" applet and drill into the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 node. In there, select the WCF HTTP Activation entry and you should be good to go.
Not much more to report on the Spec# investigations. The overall approach holds a lot of promise, but I would say that currently it's a little early to consider its use for anything more than experimentation. I'm hoping that some of the features quickly migrate over to C#, although I doubt this will be happening in the 3.0 timeframe.