Question

I’m currently writing a iphone app which will consume WCF services over a secure connection (SSL/https). I have managed to consume this service while testing locally via http.

Now we want to make sure the service is secure, so we’ve set up a UAT server with a properly signed certificate to run our tests.

We are using a custom binding, coupled with security mode TransportWithMessageCredentials which requires a username/password in the ClientCredentials property.

Generated the proxy using SISvcUtil.exe

When I try to call this secure service from the iPhone, I get a rather lovely generic error of:

Exception in async operation: System.Net.WebException: There was an error on processing web request: Status code 500(internal server error)
(Here is a pastebin of full exception ).

I’ve tried implicitly accepting the certificate using:
ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallBack = (sender, cert, chain, ssl) => true;
but this just returns the same 500 error.

The same code works great on a windows machine but not on the iphone. Has anyone else come across this problem and/or know of a solution to it?

Answer 1

So it would seem that at the time of writing, Monotouch doesn’t support WCF very well (it currently has a barebones implementation).

Due to this, and the need for decent security around our webservice, we’ve decided to go down a different route; validating the user via username+password over a secure, encrypted SSL connection everytime the web service is called. We use Silverlight 3.0 SiSUtil.exe to generate the bindings for the webservice rather than include it as a web reference in the project.