Take the 2-minute tour ×

We have a WCF Service (self-hosted) which can receive several types of calls from the outside, each call encapsulates a business logic procedure.

We need to construct a web application which will act as an administrating app, for all users of the service.

So we need to have access to all inner-entities of the service and not just the business calls.

How should this be done the most effective way?


I wasn't too specific because I see this as a general issue. our Customers are retailers which have clients of their own, so when I say Customer, it's our client and when I say Client - it's our client's client.


  • Service X allows registered clients of Customers to commit transactions.
  • there are several transaction types.
  • the service receives the transactions from several different devices.
  • The service is a WCF self hosted service.

The Customer, needs to register devices for use, register different configurations for different devices and many other registering and administrating which needs to be done.

All of this is done in a website. The website users are the Customers, the Retailers, not the end clients

So as I see it I have these options

  1. Reference the dll which holds all service-related entities - this is ok now because the website and the service are on the same machine, but what if this changes? is this a good approach?
  2. Make service calls for all of this registering and administrating, which I'm not even sure how it should be done.

So, I need your help in understanding the best way to do this...

share|improve this question

2 Answers 2

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Use approach 1 and bundle the dll with each app (standard procedure).

share|improve this answer

Like @LachlanB I am a bit unsure what you are asking, but here is an attempt.

Sounds like two sets of services that share some code, classes, and database. Some are used ONLY by the admin console (secured or hosted elsewhere - doesn't matter).

Assuming the two sets of related services share a common storage / database, it should be clean. This is a fairly common pattern for what it (I think) you are trying to do.

Anything not workable with this model?

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


