403.3 Problem with WCF and Azure WebRole in local development fabric

During the building of the WCF service mentioned in my previous post, I came across an error when trying to access the WCF service when running it within the local development fabric.  It worked fine when just running the web role, and when deployed into Azure.  So, this led me to investigating if the IIS as used by the local development fabric to see if it was not configured to serve .SVC files.

One of the first things that I did to investigate was to just navigate to the service in the browser with a brand new service project that I put together.  When doing this, I received the following:



There should be a page showing the information about the service, instead a 403.3 error.  Likewise, when stepping through the debugger, similar errors could be seen when checkin the exceptions.

After a bit of googling, the solution to this turns out to be the following.  Apparently, WCF is not configured properly with IIS.  This feels very similar to the problem when ASP.NET sometimes is not configured properly, in that the solution is very similar.

To solve the problem, navigate to the windows communication foundation folder as shown here, and run the "ServiceModelReg.exe -i" command.



After running that program, you will see output similar to the following and the problem will then be solved.