DotNetShoutout

This post is part of a series about WCF extensibility points. For a list of all previous posts and planned future ones, go to the index page.

We’re now entering the realm of the less used extensibility points for the WCF runtime. Operation selectors could well be left as an internal implementation detail for WCF, but for some reason the designers decided to make them public (I think the guideline back then was if anyone can come up with a scenario where a user would use it, then WCF would expose a hook for that). The server selector (IDispatchOperationSelector) is actually interesting to have as a public hook, as the whole UriTemplate model for REST services was built on top of it – basically, the selector knows about the HTTP method and URI templates for each service operation, and based on those properties of incoming messages it can call the appropriate operation. For “normal” (i.e., SOAP) endpoints, the operation selector implementation (which happens to be internal) is based on the addressing of the binding – in most of the cases it simply matches the Action header of the message with a map of action to the operation names...