Programatically set WCF timeout in debug mode

Question

I'm using WCF in communciation between a server and client (both written in C#).

In release-mode, the timouts should be set to ~20 seconds, but in debug mode I want to set them to a higher value so that I can debug/step in my code without the timeout occuring.

I know that I can change the timeouts by modifying the app.config file. However, I've got two different bindings and 4 time out values in each so I would have to change in several places, and its easy to forget.

To solve this, I would like to have a small #if DEBUG-section in my code which programatically changes the timeout values to 1 hour.

I tried to use the following code to do this:

Configuration configuration = 
       ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
ServiceModelSectionGroup serviceModel = 
       ServiceModelSectionGroup.GetSectionGroup(configuration); 

BindingsSection bindings = serviceModel.Bindings;

foreach (var configuredBinding in bindings.WSHttpBinding.ConfiguredBindings)
{
 configuredBinding.CloseTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 30, 0);
 configuredBinding.OpenTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 30, 0);

but the *Timeout properties are readonly so I get a compilation error.

I'm not fond of the idea of creating bindings from scratch programatically. If I change some of the attributes in the app.config, I have to remember to do the same change in the code to make sure that the debug-behavior is similar to the release-behavior (except for the timeouts..)

Anyone has a good tip on how to handle this?

Answer 1

You could do the following:

• create the binding and the endpoint in code
• set the timeouts on the binding instance
• then create your client proxy using those two elements

Something like:

BasicHttpBinding myBinding = new BasicHttpBinding("ConfigName");
myBinding.CloseTimeout = .......
myBinding.OpenTimeout = .......
myBinding.ReceiveTimeout = .......
myBinding.SendTimeout = .......

EndpointAddress myEndpoint = new EndpointAddress("http://server:8181/yourservice");

YourServiceClient proyx = new YourServiceClient(myBinding, myEndpoint);

That way, you can leverate the basic config by specifying the binding to be based on the config, and yet you can tweak the settings you want and create your client proxy from it.

Answer 2

You can create a second binding in the web.config and set a longer sendTimeout.

        if (debug)
        {
            proxy =  new MyClient("WSHttpBinding_MyLocal");
        }
        else
        {
            proxy = new MyClient("WSHttpBinding_MyDev");
        }

        <wsHttpBinding>
            <binding name="WSHttpBinding_MyLocal" closeTimeout="00:01:00"
                openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:20:00"

...