WCF Tip: Using Properties in Service Contracts

If you check out any of our previous WCF Tutorials, you'll notice all of the Service Contracts are implemented with interfaces containing only methods. For the longest time I thought that's all that was supported, until I thought about it a little more. In C# land, properties are simply wrappers around a get method and set method, so why wouldn't we be able to use properties in a service contract? Well the answer is we can.

Let's start by checking out the service contract we created for our interprocess communication tutorial.

Let's add a property to this interface that retrieves the last string that was reversed.

Since the property doesn't have the OperationContract attribute, it won't be available through a WCF Service. You might initially think to just throw the attribute above the property, but doing so would result in this compile-time error:

That makes sense, since the property is not a method. What is a method, though, is the get portion of that property. This means, all we have to do is move the attribute to above the get keyword.

And there you have it, you now have a WCF service contract using properties. It's definitely better than having to implement separate get and set methods for each value.