Understanding the Types of Behaviors

There are proxy behaviors and dispatch behaviors. Proxy behaviors, depicted in Figure 9.1, are the mechanisms by which proxies do their work of taking invocations of operations in the code for a client and translating those into messages to be transmitted to a service via the Channel Layer. Dispatch behaviors, depicted in Figure 9.2, are the mechanisms by which incoming messages, after having been processed by the Channel Layer, are translated into invocations of the methods of the service type by the Windows Communication Foundation's Dispatcher.

Figure 9.1. Proxy behaviors.

Figure 9.2. Dispatch behaviors.

There are five subtypes of proxy and dispatch behaviors:

• Channel behaviors are proxy behaviors that apply to all of the invocations of the methods of a proxy, such as the built-in ViaUri behavior.

• Service behaviors are dispatch behaviors that apply to all the messages to be processed by a service type, such as the built-in ServiceMetadata behavior.

• Endpoint behaviors are dispatch behaviors that apply to the messages arriving via a given endpoint, such as the built-in ListenUri behavior.

• Contract behaviors are proxy or dispatch behaviors specific to a given contract.

• Operation behaviors are proxy or dispatch behaviors specific to a given operation.