WCF ChannelFactory vs generating proxy

There are 3 basic ways to create a WCF client:

1. Let Visual Studio generate your proxy. This auto generates code that connects to the service by reading the WSDL. If the service changes for any reason you have to regenerate it. The big advantage of this is that it is easy to set up - VS has a wizard and it's all automatic. The disadvantage is that you're relying on VS to do all the hard work for you, and so you lose control.

2. Use ChannelFactory with a known interface. This relies on you having local interfaces that describe the service (the service contract). The big advantage is that can manage change much more easily - you still have to recompile and fix changes, but now you're not regenerating code, you're referencing the new interfaces. Commonly this is used when you control both server and client as both can be much more easily mocked for unit testing. However the interfaces can be written for any service, even REST ones - take a look at this Twitter API.

3. Write your own proxy - this is fairly easy to do, especially for REST services, using the HttpClient or WebClient. This gives you the most fine grain control, but at the cost of lots of service API being in strings. For instance: var content = new HttpClient().Get("http://yoursite.com/resource/id").Content; - if the details of the API change you won't encounter an error until runtime.

Personally I've never liked option 1 - relying on the auto generated code is messy and loses too much control. Plus it often creates serialisation issues - I end up with two identical classes (one in the server code, one auto generated) which can be tided up but is a pain.

Option 2 should be perfect, but Channels are a little too limiting - for instance they completely lose the content of HTTP errors. That said having interfaces that describe the service is much easier to code with and maintain.

I use ChannelFactory along with MetadataResolver.Resolve method. Client configuration is a bother, so I get my ServiceEndpoint from the server.

When you use ChannelFactory(Of T), T is either the original contract that you can get from a reference in you project or a generated contract instance. In some projects, I generated the code from a Service Reference because I could not add a reference to the contract dll. You can even generate an asynch contract with the service reference and use that contract interface with ChannelFactory.

The main point of using ChannelFactory for me was to get rid of the WCF client config information. In the sample code below, you can see how to achieve a WCF client without config.

Dim fixedAddress = "net.tcp://server/service.svc/mex"
Dim availableBindings = MetadataResolver.Resolve(GetType(ContractAssembly.IContractName), New EndpointAddress(fixedAddress))
factoryService = New ChannelFactory(Of ContractAssembly.IContractName)(availableBindings(0))
accesService = factoryService.CreateChannel()

In my final project, the availableBindings are checked to use net.tcp or net.pipe if available. That way, I can use the best available binding for my needs. I only rely on the fact that a metadata endpoint exist on the server.

I hope this helps

BTW, this is done using .NET 3.5. However it does work also with 4.0.

Well in order to use ChannelFactory<T> you must be willing to share contract assemblies between the service and the client. If this is okay with you then ChannelFactory<T> can save you some time.

The proxy will build async functions for which is kind of nice.