I have put together a .net winform application which consumes a wcf service exposed by another .net application running as a windows service.
Since the communication is within the same machine, I chose the NetNamedPipe as the communication channel, as it is the best choice suited for inter process communication in the same machine.
I want to know if I am using the correct property choices when defining the wcf service in the .net windows service.
The WCF service behaviour is defined as:
[ServiceBehavior(
ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Single,
InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)]
I chose the "InstanceContextMode" as Single so that I know objects in the wcf service are not recreated each time a wcf service method is called by the UI client.
However, while reading up the ConcurrencyMode property to choose on MSDN, I did get a little confused. At the basic level, I understand the ConcurrencyMode property dictates whether the wcf service supports a single, multiple or reentrant calls.
Does this mean, that if my UI client application is multithreaded and I call into the wcf service methods from those threads, I should choose "Concurrency" mode as "multiple" and if my UI client is not multi threaded, I should choose "Concurrency" mode as "single"? My UI client application is not running multiple threads. All operations are performed on the main UI thread through event handlers (through button clicks, combo box selections, etc...)
I am having situations where, after installing the application on a windows test machine, my UI client is sometimes not able to connect to the wcf service. It just keeps waiting on the call to the Connect method of the wcf client object and then eventually times out. I want to know if its related to the "ConcurrencyMode" choice I made. Or is this a "NetNamedPipe" communication channel problem?
Please advice.
Thanks in advance.
Subbu
Choose concurency mode as multiple only if your host object is thread safe i.e you have manually implemented locking on shared resource or your host object dont have any shared or class level objects at all. If host object is not thread safe use concurency mode as single as in this case wcf will automatically implement lock for you, only one request will be processed at a time on a context, parallel will be queued. So here decision should really depend on if your host object is thread safe or not.