Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation

Applying Behaviors

Most of the details until now have addressed how the service looks from the outside and a little bit about how it works from the inside. A powerful concept you haven't read about a lot until now is behaviors. Influencing the internals of a service, behaviors are applied at the service level, operation level, contract level, and endpoint level. WCF comes with several behaviors out of the box, which we'll cover in this section.

With behaviors, it is possible to modify the runtime and eventually influence the internals of each type of concept where it applies (for example, endpoint, operation, contract, and service). From a programming model perspective, you can apply behaviors through configuration or by using the attributes ...