What is the purpose of WCF reliable session?

wcf nettcpbinding
Andrei Sedoi picture Andrei Sedoi · May 26, 2010 · Viewed 31.5k times · Source

The documentation around this topic is poor. I use WCF services with NetTcpBinding hosted in Windows service. The problem is that a session is dropped when it is inactive for some time. What I need is the session which is always alive. Is WCF reliable session something that can help? Or I can just play with timeout settings?

Answer

marc_s picture marc_s · May 26, 2010

No, a reliable session will time out just like any other session, too. The main question really is: why on earth do you want your sessions to be "endless" ?? If you really need this, you need to crank up the timeouts on the session.

The point of a reliable session is that the caller will know about any messages that are lost. Contrary to popular belief, the reliable session cannot guarantee delivery of a message - but if a message can't be delivered, at least the caller will know about it.

Check out some of these resources for more background info:

Related questions

Detecting Client Death in WCF Duplex Contracts

I'm trying to build a SOA where clients can perform long running queries on the server and the server responds using a callback. I'd like to be able to detect if the client disconnects (through user initiated shutdown, unhandled exception …

Read More
what is the global.asax Application_Start equivalent when using WAS in IIS7

I'd like to use the netTcpBinding for my WCF application which is currently hosted in IIS7, which means configuring it to use WAS instead. This is fairly straight forward however, my application previously made use of the Application_Start event …

Read More
WCF How much faster is TCP than HTTP

I understand that TCP is faster than HTTP for WCF but I'm interested to know by how much. I have a performance issue with a large application that uses HTTP and am considering whether moving to netTcp would yield a …

Read More