Question

Quick question, but is it best practice to wrap a service proxy class in a using statement? Meaning, in VS, we generated a proxy for a WCF service. For the service class, should it be wrapped in using? I don’t believe it implements IDisposable and there is no Dispose() method. Thanks.

Answer 1

Although proxies generated by Service Reference and svcutil.exe do implement IDisposable, in general it is not a best practice to wrap them in a using block; instead favor explicit open and closing.

Why? Well, the problem is that the Dispose method calls Close, which can throw in various circumstances, most prominently if the channel is in a Faulted state. In general this is bad, but if this happens during a finally block because you let a fault exception bubble up, it could swallow the original fault exception in favor of the Close exception, effectively losing the original exception.