Programmatically set WCF timeout in debug mode

by

I’m using WCF in communication 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 occurring.

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 programmatically 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 programmatically. 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..)

How to handle this?

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 proxy = new YourServiceClient(myBinding, myEndpoint);

That way, you can leverage the basic config when describing binding timeouts and yet you can tweak the settings you want and create your client proxy from it.

Leave a Comment