Message Disposal

My service operation has an untyped contract and I'm trying to save the messages that it receives for processing later. However, the messages always say that they are closed before I can read them. Why are the messages closed?

Messages are good for a single use, which means that once someone has finished with the message, no one else can read it even if there are multiple references pointing to the same message object. Most commonly, the service is responsible for reading and closing the messages. If you have a typed contract, then the service has to read the message to produce the types. If you have an untyped contract though, the service can hand the message to you without having read it. In either case, the service takes responsibility for closing the message after the service operation completes. This prevents you from having to think about the messages and clean up after them.

When you intend to process a message later, it's clearly not a good thing for the service to think that it is responsible for closing the message after the service operation completes. You can tell the service that you want to take control of cleaning up messages so that the service does not have this responsibility. To mark service operations for manual cleanup, add an OperationBehavior attribute to the service operation implementation that sets AutoDisposeParameters to false. It is now entirely your responsibility to clean up messages after processing is complete.

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Comments

• Anonymous
  July 26, 2007
  I have an existing web service that I need to replace with a WCF web service. How do I choose between