My latest project at work has me working with WCF for the first time and it has been an interesting experience. Over the next few weeks, I will be discussing configuration, debugging, and deployment of the WCF service and connecting to it.
Microsoft provides a few tools that can help debug your WCF services.
Error Handling
Typically, I add Global.asax to a web application in ASP.NET and use the Application_Error event to handle any uncaught exceptions.
protected void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//Insert your application’s exception logging here
}
This doesn’t work (still looking into why) for WCF services, even when hosted on IIS. A good work around is to wrap each service method with a try…catch block and calling the exception logger in the catch block.
public Object MyWcfWrapperMethod( int i )
{
try
{
//Call the method being exposed by WCF
}
catch( Exception e ){
//Log the exception
}
finally
{
//do your clean up here
}
}
Testing
Unit tests are especially helpful (aren’t they always?) in the development of your WCF services as messages from errror and exceptions can (and will) be hidden by subsequent errors. An invalid parameter to a stored procedure call can result in a high level System.ServiceModel.CommunicationObjectFaultedException.