Question

Can someone explain this to me:

I builded an really simple wcf service for testing purposes.
Consuming service from powershell using New-WebServiceProxy I found this stange behaviour:

if in wcf service I have this kind of Contract returning an int:

[OperationContract]
int GetDictionaryLength();

calling this method in powershell gives an error and the definition of the method is not what I would expect to see

PS C:\ps> $a | Get-Member getdictionarylength | fl *

TypeName :
Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.NewWebserviceProxy.AutogeneratedTypes.WebServiceProxy1_022s_pwdservice_svc_wsdl.PWDService

Name : GetDictionaryLength

MemberType : Method

Definition : System.Void
GetDictionaryLength(System.Int32&,
mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089
GetDictionaryLengthResult,
System.Boolean&, mscorlib,
Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089
GetDictionaryLengthResultSpecified)

changing the contract like this:

[OperationContract]
string GetDictionaryLength();

do a great job called in powershell.

Why this?

WCF is in .net 4.0
Powershell is V2

Answer 1

Experimenting with your answer, and then finally discover this answer, it seems all your problems will go away if you simply add [XmlSerializerFormat] to the operation contract, and the method signature will return to normal. At least my problems did when testing against a 2.0 .Net framework and powershell.