Our application uses WCF over named pipes to communicate between two processes (note: neither process is a Windows Service.) Our application has been running in the field without incident for a couple of years now.
We are now receiving reports that the presence of a third party application (specifically, Garmin Express) is breaking ours. I've installed Garmin Express in house and confirmed the behavior. Specifically the "Garmin Core Update Service", when running, causes our application to fail.
When the Garmin service is running, the "service" side of our application starts and has no problems creating the WCF endpoint. But when the client starts and attempts to connect to the service, it fails with EndpointNotFoundException, as if the service is not even running.
At this point, I can literally stop the Garmin service from the Services control panel, then re-run the client successfully without even restarting our own service. If I start the Garmin service again, further attempts to start the client fail. So this at least proves that our WCF service is up and running the whole time, and the Garmin software is somehow blocking our client's ability to connect to it.
We are using our own name for the endpoint address (e.g. something like net.pipe://localhost/MyPrivateApplication). I've tried changing this address to various other names, but that has no effect on the issue.
How can another application, simply by running, break our own application's ability to use WCF?
Update: by request, here is a code snippet from the service side. I've simplified it from our original code in an attempt to isolate the issue. So far, not a single change I've made has had any effect on the issue.
MyService service = new MyService();
ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(service);
string hostAddress = new Uri("net.pipe://localhost/MyWCFConnection");
host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IMyService), new NetNamedPipeBinding(), hostAddress);
host.Open();