Making WCF "Behave" - Part One

Some of the most misunderstood features of WCF are behaviors and channels. While these elements of the WCF stack offer a tremendous opportunity to customize the way WCF works, there is the perception (especially with channels) that it involves a lot of  "down to the metal" coding the requires an in-depth understand of of how communication stacks and network protocols work. While this knowledge would be helpful in any distributed computing paradigm, they are hardly required knowledge for extending WCF.

There is also a tendency to confuse behaviors and channels. While on a conceptual level these two types of objects are similar in that they effect communication  in some manner, they do so in different ways.

If you read my last post, you may remember that channels live in a stack between the binding and the transport. Therefore we can see that they impact how messages are communicated to a client and vice versa.

On the other hand, behaviors control the internal communication of the service by changing the way dispatchers function within the service host. It is fair to say that behaviors change the way the service host functions at runtime, while channels customize the way a particular endpoint communicates with a client.

So, a good follow up question is "What is a dispatcher?"

Dispatchers are basically traffic cops. The take incoming messages and route them to the appropriate service method. There are three types of dispatchers; channel, endpoint and operation.

Channel dispatchers receive messages from the channel stack. The channel dispatcher examines the address the message was sent to and sends it to the appropriate endpoint dispatcher. The endpoint dispatcher examines the action header of the message, and passes the message to the appropriate operation dispatcher. Finally, the operation dispatcher deserializes the message to get a set of parameters, and uses those parameters to call the method for the selected operation.

The use of dispatches in this manner allows us to create custom behaviors to act on endpoint operations by implementing the System.ServiceModel.Description.IEndpointBehavior interface or on an operation by implementing the System.ServiceModel.Description.IOperationBehavior interface. The separation of duties here is important as there are going to be behaviors that we wish to apply to all calls to an operation, in which case we would create an operation behavior, and others that we are only going to want to act on calls made through a specific endpoint, which would necessitate the creation of an endpoint behavior.

So, now we have a basic understanding of what behavior are, what they do, and where they fit in the WCF world. Next time we will create a basic custom behavior of our very own!