Many who've written a .NET application which calls a web service have had to deal with service calls passing through a proxy server. In the past, after generating the service client from WSDL, I’d set up a WebProxy (possibly with NetworkCredential) — which really isn’t all that bad, but somewhat annoying. Now, more ideally, the service calls are via svcutil generated WCF clients. However, handling proxies programmatically in WCF is more difficult since you can’t deal with a nice WebProxy object. You can set credentials via ChannelFactory.Credentials, but this has a drawback — your credentials need to be the same for the proxy and server authentication if they both use the same authentication scheme. The programmatic approach has always struck me as unnatural.
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