This isn’t great as you don’t want everyone knowing about your internal system and especially the URL of one of your web roles, with which they could do who know what.

This can easily be fixed with this patch for WCF that will now show the expected endpoint. This endpoint is actually the address of the load balancer that will then forward your request to an web role.

Once the patch is download and installed you can then simply add the following xml snippet into your behaviour for the WCF service:

With this snippet added into your web.config you can browse back to the previous service and will now see that the correct URL is displayed for your service.

The natural progression from here was to get the code working from within a web or worker role instance hosted within the cloud. Using a web role, I used the OnStart method to set up a IServiceManagent class that could then be shared with the remainder of the classes within the role.

When tracing the hosted services from either the OnStart method or from within default.aspx.cs I could successfully print out all of the services within my account. However, when I set up a WCF REST service to return these hosted services in an array I started to get an error with the connection to the Management API. Giving a argument error stating that a property with the name “httpRequest” is not present. This was even happening when I was using exactly the same code as I was elsewhere.

After a push in the right direction from Simon Davies we found out  that the issue was in the WCF REST service already having an OperationContext from the original REST call before calling out to the Service Management API. This handy blog post, help solve all my issues, all that was needed was to create a second OperationalContext before calling the management service.

using(new OperationContextScope((IContextChannel)WebRole.serviceManagement))
{
  var hostedServices = WebRole.serviceManagement.ListHostedServices(subscriberID);

  foreach (HostedService service in hostedServices)
  {
    Trace.TraceInformation("Hosted Service: {0}", service.ServiceName);
  }
}
            

Ta dar … everything now works, we can use the above code snippet to retrieve back all our hosted services by calling our own web role.