Question

In inherited a project that uses a ChannelFactory instead of a Client for WCF calls. Why would you do that?

Also, is it safe to cache the result of a ChannelFactory.CreateChannel() call or should you create a new one each time?

Answer 1

Creating the WCF client is a two-step process:

• creating the channel factory
• using that channel factory, create the actual channel

Step 1 is rather expensive in terms of processing power and speed – so if you can create the channel factory and then cache is somewhere, you can save yourself a bit of resources and create a channel off that cached channel factory will be faster than re-creating the whole client all the time.

So in this setup, I would try to cache the ChannelFactory, if you can – and re-create the channel from that factory every time you need it.