Disabling the Visual Studio Service Host

When debugging a WCF project in Visual Studio the WCF Service Host starts up to host my service. How do I stop this from happening so that I can use my own service host?

One of the new tools in Orcas is the WCF Service Host that allows you to automatically host and test a service that you've implemented. The WCF Service Host comes along with some of the specialized WCF project templates in Visual Studio, such as WCF Service Library and Syndication Service Library.

If you've picked one of these project templates, then I don't know of a good way of disabling the service host. This should be fixed in SP1 by adding some user interface to toggle the service host on and off. In the meantime, you can perform some surgery on the project file to work around this. If you look inside the actual csproj file for your project, then you'll see a PropertyGroup section that defines the project.

  <PropertyGroup>
    <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>
    <Platform Condition=" '$(Platform)' == '' ">AnyCPU</Platform>
    <ProductVersion>9.0.21022</ProductVersion>
    <SchemaVersion>2.0</SchemaVersion>
    <ProjectGuid>{3CC71D2E-7EC2-46B5-B985-F889B65E3DCD}</ProjectGuid>
    <OutputType>Library</OutputType>
    <AppDesignerFolder>Properties</AppDesignerFolder>
    <RootNamespace>WcfServiceLibrary1</RootNamespace>
    <AssemblyName>WcfServiceLibrary1</AssemblyName>
    <ProjectTypeGuids>{3D9AD99F-2412-4246-B90B-4EAA41C64699};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>
    <StartArguments>/client:"WcfTestClient.exe"</StartArguments>
    <TargetFrameworkVersion>v3.5</TargetFrameworkVersion>
  </PropertyGroup>

The ProjectTypeGuids list is what controls these special features of projects. Removing the {3D9AD99F-2412-4246-B90B-4EAA41C64699} entry from the list will disable automatic service hosting.

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