Is the use of a proxy required to consume a WCF service?

Question

I have a WCF Service that I want my client to be able to consume from IIS without going through a proxy. The client was consuming asmx service in vbscript using the htc behavior:

<div id="oWSInterop" style="behavior:url(webservice.htc)"></div>

oWSInterop.useService "http://localhost/WSInteroperability.asmx", "WSInteroperability"

Set response = oWSInterop.WSInteroperability.callServiceSync("BuildSingleDoc", 1002, 19499, XMLEncode(sAdditionalDetail))

So basically I just want to make this work with making as few changes as possible on the existing client. Am I forced to use a proxy (that is, a class on the client side that exposes the operations in the WCF service) when consuming a WCF service? I do understand the benefits of a proxy and am not opposed to using it for most other client implementations, but in this case I'm not sure I have the time to deal with it on the client - i just want it to work the way it has been with only the endpoint changing.

Answer 1

What are you seeing? What makes you thank that proxy is an issue? If that is server-side code, it should use the browsers settings (WinINet) which should work fine. Perhaps the "localhost" would be an issue, though, since to the client that still means "talk to yourself" (i.e. not the server).

If that is server side you'll probably need to configure WinHTTP appropriately; in particular, to skip the proxy for local addresses. Of course, "localhost" should loop-back anyway...

Answer 2

A client-side proxy class to call the service?

Yes, you definitely need that (unless you do REST-based WCF services, which you can call with a HttpClient alone) - that's where the whole WCF runtime lives and does its magic.

If you want to call up REST-based services, you can do this without any proxy whatsoever - but then you're left to do XML or JSON parsing yourself. It can be done, but it might not be such a great idea.

What's the problem with the proxy?? It's really just a small wrapper that bundles up your calls into a serialized message and sends it to the server side. No big harm, in my opinion....