DCS Message Proxy

Message Proxy is a WF–based activity that extends WCF Channel Factory to encapsulate discovery policy–based service consumption. This consumption enables the proxy to identify the target service endpoint. The proxy can then perform metadata exchange to determine service policies and then build the send pipeline. Additionally, Message Proxy helps in local caching of discovered services and the corresponding metadata.

If you compile a proxy class in an application and then call the method for that proxy class, the proxy class will package a SOAP request and send it across HTTP, and then receive the SOAP-encoded response.

In DCS, the ServiceModel Metadata Utility tool (Svcutil.exe) is used to create a message proxy for discovery-based service consumption. The ServiceModel Metadata Utility tool generates service model code from metadata documents and metadata documents from service model code. The Svcutil.exe file uses WSDL or a policy file that it received from the service to generate the client. The WSDL tool is used to create proxy classes from WSDL.

When you use Svcutil to access a WSDL document that has a reference to an STS, Svcutil makes a WS-MetadataExchange call to the STS. However, the STS can expose its WSDL documents by using either WS-MetadataExchange or HTTP GET.