check the availability of the WCF Web Service

Question

I want to check the availability of the WCF web service i.c service is up or down through the C# code. How to achieve that?

Answer 1

When you call Client.Open if it is down that should throw an exception which you can trap.
What I prefer to do is implement a method which returns a boolean called Ping. The code basically just does return true; so it returns as quickly as possible. On the client side I call it and trap exceptions, if I get any then I know the web service is down.
You can extend the pattern to do things like PingCheckDB or PingCheckX which can do a fake/sample test run so you enable/disable functionality on the client based on what is available.