WCF - Automatically Create ServiceHost for Multiple Services

Introduction

This blog post is about a small tip that may make working with WCF servicehost a bit easier, if you have lots of services and you need to quickly host them for testing.

Recently, I encountered a situation where we had to create multiple service host quickly for testing. Here is the code snippet which is pretty self explanatory. You can put this code in your service host which in this case is a console application.

class Program
{
   static void Main(string[] args)
   {                        
       // Stores all hosts
       List<ServiceHost> hosts = new List<ServiceHost>();

       try
       {                                   
           // Get the services element from the serviceModel element in the config file
           var section = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.serviceModel/services") 
                         as ServicesSection;
           if (section != null)
           {
               foreach (ServiceElement element in section.Services)
               {                                                
                   // NOTE: If the assembly is in another namespace, 
                   // provide a fully qualified name here in the form
                   // <typename, namespace>                        
                   // For e.g. Business.Services.CustomerService, Business.Services

                   var serviceType = Type.GetType(element.Name);  // Get the typeName 
                   var host = new ServiceHost(serviceType);

                   hosts.Add(host);  // Add to the host collection
                   host.Open();      // Open the host
               }
           }

           Console.ReadLine();
       }
       catch (Exception e)
       {
           Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
           Console.ReadLine();
       }
       finally
       {
           foreach (ServiceHost host in hosts)
           {
               if (host.State == CommunicationState.Opened)
               {
                   host.Close();
               }
               else
               {
                   host.Abort();
               }
           }
       }
   }
} 

I hope you find this useful. You can make this as a Windows service if required.