Programming WCF Services, 2nd Edition

Behaviors

By and large, the service instance mode is strictly a service-side implementation detail that should not manifest itself on the client side in any way. To support that and a few other local service-side aspects, WCF defines the notion of behaviors. A behavior is a local attribute of a service that does not affect its communication patterns. Clients should be unaware of behaviors, and behaviors do not manifest themselves in the service's binding or published metadata. WCF defines two types of service-side behaviors, governed by two corresponding attributes. The ServiceBehaviorAttribute is used to configure service behaviors; that is, behaviors that affect all endpoints (all contracts and operations) of the service. The ServiceBehavior attribute is applied directly on the service implementation class. You have already seen two behaviors in the previous chapters: Chapter 1 used the service metadata behavior to instruct the host to publish the service's metadata, and Chapter 3 used the service behavior to ignore the data object extension. No client could ever tell simply by examining the communication and the exchanged messages if the service is ignoring the data object extension or who was publishing its metadata.

The OperationBehaviorAttribute is used to configure operation behaviors; that is, behaviors that affect only the implementation of a particular operation. The OperationBehavior attribute can be applied only on a method that implements a contract operation, never ...