How can I check that a WCF host is available before I use a channel from a client?

Question

I am creating a windows service that starts a number of slave processes. In each of these slave process I start listening on a named pipe for message from the master process.

I currently have the situation where the master process calls a slave via a named pipe before the slave is fully started and starts listening on the named pipe.

    ProcessStartInfo processStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo("slave");
    processStartInfo.Arguments = Address 

    Process process = new Process();
    process.StartInfo = processStartInfo;

    process.Start();

    base.Endpoint.Binding = new NetNamedPipeBinding(NetNamedPipeSecurityMode.None);
    base.Endpoint.Address = Address;

    base.Channel.RemoteMethod();

If I do this the channel gets into CommunicationState.Faulted and any subsequent calls on the channel fail as well.

What can I do to verify from the master that the slave process starts listening? Or how can I recover from the CommunicationState.Faulted to retry my remote call?

Answer 1

The only way to recover from the Faulted state is to reiniailize the WCF Client by re-building the instance and call the Open() method.

In general, before I call the service, I always check the Status property and if it is not Opened I try to reinitialize it as I described above. If it fails, there is a problem with the server. (In my case, the state gets faulted due to inactivity, so initialization ussually succedes)