WCF Full Duplex Handle Client Disconnection

Question

Is there any way for me to detect client disconnection from my service? I only get the chance to know if a certain client is disconnected on try-catch method which is not a very good way to do it. I don't want to create a timer for each new client that connects on my service just to monitor its last transaction.

Answer 1

No, there is no simple or elegant way to detect client disconnection. It would be a nice environment if, when the client shut down or crashed, the service received a "ClientTerminated" event. However, this behaviour simply doesn't fit with a message-based architecture.

A not-so elegant solution is to periodically ping the client with a callback method, and see if this call times out.

Alternatively, if you are using PerSession instancing, you can set the inactivityTimeout to a short value (say, one minute as opposed to the default 10), and on the client side use a timer to periodically invoke an empty method on the server.

See this question for a similar discussion.