Making WCF RIA Services work in a DMZ/Multitier architecture using Application Request Routing

Introduction

In large companies / governments / ... most of the time the application architecture needs to follow a set of rules (focused on maintainability and security).
These could be rules like the following:

The applications need to be developed following a Multitier architecture
Each tier should be physically separated for security.
The business logic tier is the only one that can connect to the data tier.
The presentation tier only connects to the business logic tier.
The presentation tier may not directly connect to the data tier.
The presentation tier is located in a DMZ, other tiers are heavily secured.
...
Each project / company will have its own rules but the concept stays the same.
Here is an example of how this could be achieved in ASP.NET:

A. Preparing the server(s)

Make sure you have IIS 7 or IIS 7.5
Download the Application Request Routing extension: x86 / x64
Install the extension (it might install other extensions first)
For testing purposes we'll simulate 2 servers on one machine.
To do this, open c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts with notepad.

127.0.0.1 presentationtier
127.0.0.1 logictier

We'll link these hostnames using host headers in IIS.

If you have 2 servers you can use for testing, please do (and you can skip this step).
But don't forget to install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit!
Finally we'll configure the Application Request Routing.

Read more: Codeproject

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