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I am in the process of building a Web based client for a Server application which is running as a Windows Service. The server application currently has a Windows Form based Client Application written in C# and the idea is to obsolete it and provide a new Web based Client Application. The Server application will be exposing REST based APIs and the Client Application would be using the REST APIs to communicate with the Server Application. (Currently the Server App exposes SOAP based endpoints which are consumed by the Windows Form Based App)

The Browser based client application would be written using Angular JS. The Client Application would be used by at max 10 concurrent users. The App is targeted for system administrators and would be used inside the enterprise environment.

Another requirement is to integrate Active Directory Authentication for the Client Application. So given the performance requirement and authentication requirements, I am wondering whether I should use IIS for hosting the Web Application. Or should I just use the existing Server to self host the web pages.

If at all I go with Self Hosting option, would Katana Self host be a good option? Or should i use WCF Rest kit to serve the pages?

What are the performance implications of using a Self Hosted mechanism for hosing the Web Application compared to IIS?

Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Secure Blob
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1 Answers1

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WCF REST Starter kit is still in second preview 2 version from 2009 so I'd be pushed to recommend using it.

The question of IIS or self host depends, do you need the features that IIS has out of the box like logging, restart after failure, etc?

My suggestion would be to use ASP.NET Web API (or Nancy, which is an excellent choice too) but keep your hosting layer separate from your application layer so you have the flexibility to decide how you host your service later on.

The second suggestion is performance test early on, pick a hosting mechanism and measure how the service copes under load - you may find out that you're worrying about something that you don't need to.

Mattl
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