Recovering from a CommunicationObjectFaultedException in WCF

Question

I have a client app that tries every 10 seconds to send a message over a WCF web service. This client app will be on a computer on board a ship, which we know will have spotty

Answer 1

Client service proxies cannot be reused once they have faulted. You must dispose of the old one and recreate a new one.

You must also make sure you close the client service proxy properly. It is possible for a WCF service proxy to throw an exception on close, and if this happens the connecting is not closed, so you must abort. Use the "try{Close}/catch{Abort}" pattern. Also bear in mind that the dispose method calls close (and hence can throw an exception from the dispose), so you can't just use a using like with normal disposable classes.

For example:

try
{
    if (yourServiceProxy != null)
    {
        if (yourServiceProxy.State != CommunicationState.Faulted)
        {
            yourServiceProxy.Close();
        }
        else
        {
            yourServiceProxy.Abort();
        }
    }
}
catch (CommunicationException)
{
    // Communication exceptions are normal when
    // closing the connection.
    yourServiceProxy.Abort();
}
catch (TimeoutException)
{
    // Timeout exceptions are normal when closing
    // the connection.
    yourServiceProxy.Abort();
}
catch (Exception)
{
    // Any other exception and you should 
    // abort the connection and rethrow to 
    // allow the exception to bubble upwards.
    yourServiceProxy.Abort();
    throw;
}
finally
{
    // This is just to stop you from trying to 
    // close it again (with the null check at the start).
    // This may not be necessary depending on
    // your architecture.
    yourServiceProxy = null;
}

There is a blog article about this here