A couple months ago I wrote a post on how to host WCF services in IIS that expose themselves as endpoints on the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. The principal challenge in this scenario is that IIS/WAS relies on message-based activation and will only launch the host after the first request comes in. However, until the host is launched the service will not connect to the Service Bus, and consequently will never receive a message. A classic catch-22.
The solution I proposed was to leverage the Application Warm-Up Extension for IIS 7.5, which will proactively load and initialize processes before the first request arrives. While this is acceptable, I’ve found a better solution using the Windows Server AppFabric Autostart (thanks to conversations with Ron Jacobs).
