Closing and Disposing a WCF Service

Question

The Close method on an ICommunicationObject can throw two types of exceptions as MSDN outlines here. I understand why the Close method can throw those exceptions, but what I don't understand is why the Dispose method on a service proxy calls the Close method without a try around it. Isn't your Dispose method the one place where you want make sure you don't throw any exceptions?

Answer 1

It seems to be a common design pattern in .NET code. Here is a citation from Framework design guidelines

Consider providing method Close(), in addition to the Dispose(), if close is standard terminology in the area. When doing so, it is important that you make the Close implementation identical to Dispose ...

Here is a blog post in which you can find workaround for this System.ServiceModel.ClientBase design problem

Answer 2

Yes, typically Dispose is one of the places you want to ensure exceptions aren't thrown. However, based on this MSDN forum thread there were some historical reasons for this behavior. As such, the recommended pattern is the try{Close}/catch{Abort} paradigm.