Extending a WCF service
As we have learned earlier, there are more than 30 extension points in the WCF runtime, but the most common situation is to customize the extension of a behavior. Discussion of all WCF extension points is beyond the context of this book, and from this point on, we will focus only on the behavior extension.
WCF behaviors are types that define how a WCF service behaves. A custom behavior can be applied to a WCF service to modify the default behavior and add custom extensions, to inspect and validate service configuration, or modify runtime behavior of the service.
To extend a behavior, DispatchRuntime
and DispatchOperation
need to be extended on the service side and ClientRuntime
and ClientOperation
need to be extended on the client side. This can be achieved by implementing corresponding interfaces such as IParameterInspector
, IDispatchMessageInspector
, and IClientMessageFormatter
. These interfaces provide the necessary methods to allow parameters to be inspected, messages...