Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition

Resource Synchronization Context

Incoming service calls execute on worker threads from the I/O completion thread pool and are unrelated to any service or resource threads. This means that by default the service cannot rely on any kind of thread affinity (that is, always being accessed by the same thread). Much the same way, the service cannot by default rely on executing on any host-side custom threads created by the host or service developers. The problem with this situation is that some resources may rely on thread affinity. For example, user interface resources updated by the service must execute and be accessed only by the user interface (UI) thread. Other examples are a resource (or a service) that makes use of the thread local storage (TLS) to store out-of-band information shared globally by all parties on the same thread (using the TLS mandates use of the same thread), or accessing components developed using legacy Visual Basic or Visual FoxPro, which also require thread affinity (due to their own use of the TLS). In addition, for scalability and throughput purposes, some resources or frameworks may require access by their own pool of threads.

Whenever an affinity to a particular thread or threads is expected, the service cannot simply execute the call on the incoming WCF worker thread. Instead, the service must marshal the call to the correct thread(s) required by the resource it accesses.

.NET Synchronization Contexts

.NET 2.0 introduced the concept of a synchronization context ...