ServiceModelReg, WCF Setup, and Exceptions...Oh my!

During WCF install, or while troubleshooting a WCF configuration related issue, you may have run into our WCF registration tool ServiceModelReg. This tool provides a command line mechanism for you to manage the WCF configuration of a machine. Most often you will use this tool to bring your box back to a default install state, or explicitly manage the .svc WebHost registration on IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0.

As the WCF product heads to release, as the owner of ServiceModelReg, I have started to receive interesting failure reports. It seems that the WCF team could not reproduce the myriad of ways a machine could become unstable, or even corrupt, during our validation of ServiceModelReg. In some cases, we could not reproduce a certain corruption even after receiving a detailed report of the issue.

To help ease the pain as I learn of these issue, I will add a small description and workaround (when available) here. In some cases, we will learn of an issue too late to address it before we release, and it may not make the servicing bar (that whole tradeoff argument) to warrant a hotfix release. Hopefully, I can provide enough information to clearly identify a particular issue and outline steps to either work around or address the underlying problem.

If you run into an issue that you do not see described here, feel free to let me know.

Mark Gabarra

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