Question

I have a WCF service configured to use ASP.NET session state. I have tested this WCF service with a WPF client and the session state is maintained across the different web requests.

Now I am trying to use this same WCF service from a Silverlight app which uses the new Http stack independent from the browser. I need to use this stack in order to be able to understand our WCF service faults. My problem is that in this case we are not able to read from the responses the Set-Cookie header with the ASP.NET_SessionId cookie or set the Cookie header in the requests.

This is the binding from the Silverligth application:

  <customBinding>
    <binding name="customHttpBinding_IBasoaWebService" sendTimeout="01:00:00">
            <binaryMessageEncoding />
      <httpCookieContainer />
            <httpTransport maxBufferSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" />
    </binding>
  </customBinding>

And this is the binding of the WCF service:

  <basicHttpBinding>
    <binding name="basicHTTP" closeTimeout="01:00:00" openTimeout="01:00:00"
        maxBufferPoolSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647"
        receiveTimeout="01:00:00" sendTimeout="01:00:00" allowCookies="false">
      <readerQuotas maxDepth="2147483647" maxStringContentLength="2147483647" maxArrayLength="2147483647"
        maxBytesPerRead="2147483647" maxNameTableCharCount="2147483647" />
      <security mode="None" />
    </binding>
  </basicHttpBinding>

In the Silverlight application we are using this code to read the Set-Cookie header in the response:

            IHttpCookieContainerManager cookieManager = channel.GetProperty<IHttpCookieContainerManager>();
            if (cookieManager.CookieContainer == null)
                cookieManager.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
            Uri applicationUri = new Uri(Application.Current.Host.Source, "../");
            string cookieString = cookieManager.CookieContainer.GetCookieHeader(applicationUri);
            ParseCookieString(cookieString);

And this is the code to set the ASP.NET Session ID cookie in the request:

            IHttpCookieContainerManager cookieManager = channel.GetProperty<IHttpCookieContainerManager>();
            if (cookieManager.CookieContainer == null)
                cookieManager.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
            Uri applicationUri = new Uri(Application.Current.Host.Source, "../");
            Cookie cookie = new Cookie("ASP.NET_SessionId", aspNetSessionId);
            cookieManager.CookieContainer.Add(applicationUri, cookie);

Checking through Fiddler the messages which are exchanged I see that the WCF service sends correctly the Set-Cookie header in the first response, but the Silverlight is not able to read it. I have also tried to set the Cookie header in the request through the CookieContainer class, but with no luck. I cannot see it in Fiddler.

Coould someone give me an advice about what I must be doing wrong?

Many thanks in advance.

Jose Antonio Arroba

Answer 1

Finally I have been able to find a workaround to solve this problem.

The reason why the Cookie header was not sent with the requests was that I was setting a bad Uri in the Cookie object. If I am trying to connect to http://localhost:8080/Service, it seems taht the correct Uri value to provide is http://localhost:8080 and not http://localhost:8080/Service.

However I am still wondering how to read the Set-Cookie sent by the server. My workaround consist on sending the ASP.NET Session ID also in a custom SOAP header and read it in the client, which is IMHO rather redundant. But it works.