Creating asynchronous WCF clients without using Service References

Question

Currently I do not use Service References as I feel the code it autogenerates is more weight than I need. Instead I generate a proxy class by doing:

public class MyClient : ClientBase<IMyService>, IMyService

This has worked great for me, no proxy classes are generated so I reuse the same datatypes. But this only lets me create synchronous client methods.

What would it take to generate async versions? I have taken a look at the autogenerated code that adding a Service Reference would do and it seems like soo much boilerplate. A ton of begin/end/onbegin/oncomplete associated event arg datatypes etc etc.

Is there a simpler way with less scaffolding needed to create async client methods? My ultimate end goal is to be able to use the new c# 5 async/await keywords on webservice clients

Answer 1

You can always author a contract IMyAsyncService that is exactly like IMyService but uses the Begin/End async pattern (and has [ServiceContract(Name="IMyService")] to keep the same name). It will be the same wire contract, and work with ClientBase, but now you have async methods you can use with await.