Best practice for large WCF service?

Question

What is the best practice for writing a rather large wcf service, containing a lot of OperationContracts and DataContracts?

How would I separate functional areas into se

Answer 1

I'll go off the track here and say I've used monolithic WCF contracts, functionally separated contracts (with a maximum of ten methods along Juval's guidelines in his book), and I've also tried a message handling architecture where a service has a single method that takes a base message, and handlers that 'know' how to unwrap and process the message after it crosses the wire.

I'm a big fan of the latter if you've got .NET on both sides of the fence. Oren has a screencast on the idea with code. I don't know what your needs are but this is working for me.

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/03/30/Hibernating-Rhinos-8--Going-Distributed-amp-Building-our-own.aspx

That said if you're already coming from "I need a large WCF service" then going to one method is probably not going to cut it for you. If that's true then Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services is the standard you should uphold in your design.