A while ago I published a small and neat Dynamic Proxy that could be used to automatically create for you implementation of the (WCF) ClientBase<T> so you would not have to generate that from the service interface and hand-coded or even bother to maintain.

One of it’s great advantages was that you could ask for a “Reusable” proxy which was basically a wrapper around the proxy that you didn’t have to close/dispose in case of a fault.

As you might know WCF requires that you dispose of the proxy if there is any type of fault detected. Doing this is a pain in any type of code as you have to manage that connection life-time while actually all you care most of the times is that you talk to the service and not the life-time of your connection. The WCF Client Proxy was also doing this management for you allowing you so simply focus on your business and not on opening/closing your connections.

However there are moments in which you also want to specifically close your proxy for example using a using statement. Because the WCF Client Proxy was returning you the exact interface that you requested and if that interface was not implementing IDisposable you had to reside on a trick and cast the received proxy to IDisposable (as the proxy generates that behinds the scenes for you anyway) and use it like this:

IService1 service = WCFClientProxy<IService1>.GetReusableInstance("Service1");
using((IDisposable)service)
{
    service.MyOperation1();
}

This was again a bit ugly as you have to care about the connection and you can’t just use it as any other interface. You do have to be aware that your interface represents a WCF service that you want to dispose of.

One other potential scenario that several people hit is in websites that talk to external WCF services and you use the same service from within the same page several times (for example from different controls). In practice in this scenario you will open/close the same proxy multiple times during the lifetime of the page.

Connection Pooling

In order to simplify the management of WCF connections during the lifetime of a webpage or even a WCF Operation Call and reduce the overhead of caring to dispose of proxies I’ve now added a ProxyConnectionPool class to the dynamic proxy that can be enabled to automatically pickup all the created WCF connections and pool them (as in return the same one back to you if you use it from the same thread and it’s safe to reuse).

To enable the connection pooling all you have to do is:

ProxyConnectionPool.EnableConnectionPool = true;

Now every time you do a call do GetReusableInstance or other methods on the WCFClientProxy the connection you receive might be a pooled one (same tread only pooling) or a new one just registered with the pool. This should improve your performance as creating WCF Proxies is an expensive process that you want to avoid as much as possible.

Disposing the pool

Once you finish your work on that thread you can simply ask the connection pool to dispose all the WCF connections from the pool using:

ProxyConnectionPool.Current.Dispose();

Automatic disposing

If you use WCF inside a website to call other WCF services you should then simply include the following module in your web.config so you get automatic disposing of all WCF connections created on each page request (with peace of mind included).

<system.web>
    <httpModules>
        <add name="WcfConnectionPool" type="ACorns.WCF.DynamicClientProxy.Pool.WcfConnectionPoolHandler,ACorns.WCF.DynamicClientProxy"/>
    </httpModules>
</system.web>

This module will automatically enable the connection pool for you and make sure all the WCF proxies created are nicely disposed at the end of each page request. This truly allows you to focus on writing your business code and not bothering about connection management of your WCF services. Your code will now become:

IService1 service = WCFClientProxy<IService1>.GetReusableInstance("Service1");
service.MyOperation1();

Let someone else deal with the fact that you use WCF

Licence

I was requested several times about the licence this code is. Here is my official statement:

This package is provided "AS IS," without express or implied warranty of any kind, and may be used and modified.

This package may be used in corporate applications without any pretence.

However I would appreciate if you would drop me a line to let me know you are using it to corneliu at acorns.com.au or even donate some money by PayPal to the same address

Download

Here is the latest version of the WCF Client Proxy 1.3.0