Implementing WCF Services Without Referencing WCF

Modifying Behavior of WCF-Free Service Implementations

ploeh blog — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:55:27 GMT

In my previous post , I explained how to implement a WCF service without referencing WCF. In simple cases,

Unit Testing Duplex WCF Services

ploeh blog — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:44:29 GMT

One of my readers recently asked me about unit testing WCF services when they have callbacks. Given that

re: Implementing WCF Services Without Referencing WCF

Paul Gamblen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:07:13 GMT

Hi Mark.

We use Juval Lowrys InProcFactory for unit testing our services. It doesnt work for all WCF configurations but in the most part suffices for what we want to do. We have extended ClientBase to either use a hosted version of the service or an in process version of the service based on configuration.

Thought you might be interested.

Paul.

re: Implementing WCF Services Without Referencing WCF

ploeh — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:06:30 GMT

Hi Paul

Thank you for your tip. There are, as far as I know, a couple of third party InProc transports for WCF. I normally use the named pipes transport for unit testing, although a faster transport would be nicer.

Personally, I don't find that the added overhead of having to reference and manage yet another library to gain a bit of speed is worth the effort, but YMMV. Not that test speed is unimportant, but I find the named pipes transport sufficiently fast to my purposes.

This whole discussion is orthogonal to the subject of this post, which is about how you completely remove WCF from your service implementation. There's a lot of good reasons for doing that, and increased test speed is only a side effect.

That's not to dismiss your idea at all. I think it's a valid contribution that may be beneficient to a lot of people, so I thank you for sharing :)