We recently had a valid reason for *looking* to see if we could (when hosting WCF in IIS) override the ServiceHost.Open() method - specifically we were looking at the possibility of implementing a retry for certain exceptions thrown on open.
The most obvious course of action was to look at declaring a custom service host factory, reference this from the "factory" attribute in the .svc markup and implement our own "ServiceHost" implementation derived from ServiceHostBase.
The problem is that "open" is defined on the communication channel class and it's not virtual, we thought about redefinition by hiding (declaring a reimplementation of "open" with the the "new" keyword in our service host class) but it would appear that IIS internally takes a reference to serviceHostBase - and redefining that would be a step too far IMO.
So in short it doesn't look like it's (easily) possible, if at all, I guess not many people have a reason to consider doing this with IIS hosted services.
(We did also take a quick look at what might be possible if we hooked up to some of the events around open, but this "felt" wrong then and still does, even though it *might* be technically possible).
This was all in context of "on-premise" services connecting to azure via the Azure "ServiceBus", in some circumstances we were getting "AddressAlreadyInUseException" - the discussion was around what it might take to implement a "retry" if the serviceHost.Open() failed with that exception; subsequently we understand that MS intend to release changes to support load balancing in SB - in other words allow more than one connection per URI, so our issue should be resolved with this change.
