Debugging in a Windows service host

Sometimes when developing WCF services that are hosted in a Windows Service application, we might find that it is not quite convenient to debug the service code. Though we can use WCF tracing or message logging to perform some verbose-level troubleshooting, in some cases it is still necessary to have a debugger (like Visual Studio) to do step-through code debugging against the service source code.

In this recipe, we will demonstrate how you can use Visual Studio to perform source-code debugging against a WCF service hosted in a Windows Service application.

Getting ready

Before we start debugging the Windows Service application that hosts a WCF service, there are several things we need to get ready. Here is a quick list to go through:

• Windows Service should already be successfully compiled and set up

• The Windows Service EXE image should be compiled either as a Debug version or a Release version with debugging information (symbols)

• The developer needs to log...