Solution Configuration

It’s finally time to start coding. In this chapter, we will see how to create the ServiceStack.Succinctly.Host project and enable the ServiceStack framework.

The first thing to do is to create a new solution and create a list of projects as specified in the following table.

8. Project list

Step 1: Create a New ASP.NET Empty Web Application

Use Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET Empty Web Application project and call it ServiceStack.Succinctly.Host.

7. Creation of a new ASP.NET Empty Web Application project

Step 2: Install ServiceStack Binaries and Configure web.config

In order to run our first web service, we need to add ServiceStack as a project reference. This can be done manually or by using NuGet, which is the easiest way in my opinion.

By running the following command in Visual Studio’s Package Manager Console, the reference will be automatically added to the project:

The following packages will be installed by default:

• ServiceStack
• ServiceStack.Common
• ServiceStack.Interfaces
• ServiceStack.OrmLite
• ServiceStack.OrmLite.SqlServer
• ServiceStack.Redis
• ServiceStack.ServiceInterface
• ServiceStack.Text

Tip: If you want to mix ServiceStack with your existing ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC applications, there are two packages that were created specifically to help you install ServiceStack automatically:

PM> Install-Package ServiceStack.Host.Mvc
PM> Install-Package ServiceStack.Host.AspNet

After adding the required binary files to the project, we need to instruct our application to use the ServiceStack HTTP handler, which will act as an entry point of the application. This is done by putting the following configuration in the web.config file.

Step 3: Creating the Application Host

In order to run a ServiceStack web service, we have to start the application host when the IIS application starts. There can be only one application host per application pool and, therefore, creating multiple application hosts is not allowed. The following code represents the minimum AppHostBase implementation. The Global class refers to the Global.asax.cs file.