Connecting over internet to WCF service using wsDualHttpBinding times out

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There’s a real problem with WSDualHttpBinding and the way most people are connected to the internet – being behind a router means, at least with IPv4, having NAT ruin the party, as you’ve already discovered.

With WSDualHttpBinding, you have two connections: From the client to the server, and from the server to the client.

Usually, the client-to-server connection isn’t a big deal – that’s how most communication is done over the internet. In your case, it seems that you were behind a firewall and you’ve opened/forwarded the needed ports. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the second connection – from the server to the client. Basically what happens with that second connection is that the client acts as a server, and the server acts as a client. So you need to do the same port opening/forwarding with each and every client that connects to your service, because it also acts as a server! This is of course an unreasonable demand to make of every user of your service. That’s why WSDualHttpBinding is more suited to server-to-server communications, where the setup is a one-time affair.

Instead of trying to get WSDualHttpBinding to work, I suggest you switch to NetTcpBinding. Since both WSDualHttpBinding and NetTcpBinding are WCF-only, Microsoft-only, proprietary connection schemes, you’re not losing much in the way of interoperability. What you’re gaining, on the other hand, is a lot:

  1. NetTcpBinding uses only a single connection, from the client to the server, while allowing two way communication like WSDualHttpBinding. So there’s no need to deal with port opening/forwarding on the client side – NAT is a non-issue.
  2. The communication protocol is binary and is more compact than the plain-text XML used in WSDualHttpBinding. Less data transfer means a better performing service.
  3. With NetTcpBinding, you can get instant notification of when a client disconnects, since a socket is closed. No need to wait for a HTTP timeout like you do with WSDualHttpBinding.
  4. A single connection means there nothing that can go out of sync – with WSDualHttpBinding, one of the two connections may drop while the other may still be active, having only one way communication. WCF has a way of dealing with that, but it’s better to just avoid the issue in the first place.

Switching to NetTcpBinding usually only requires a configuration change – the code remains the same. It’s simple, it’s fast, it’s much less of a hassle and most importantly – it just works.

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