Question

I’m trying to convert an ASP.Net web service to WCF application. The client is on the .Net Compact Framework which does not support WCF so I need to make sure the WCF keeps supporting ASP style webservices. When I add the web service reference in Visual Studio the generated proxy class’ methods have extra arguments.

For example if a method is defined as:

public void GetEmpInfo(int empNo)

That method will appear in the proxy class as:

public void GetEmpInfo(int empNo, bool empNoSpecified)

What causes this, and how do I get it to stop?

Answer 1

Check out this blog post …

Where did these extra boolean
“specified” members come from and what
do they do? The answer is the schema
that the WCF data contract serializer
generates by default. Because of the
way its versioning model works, the
serializer generates all data members
as optional elements. The older web
services stack, ASP.NET Web Services
(“ASMX”), uses a different serializer,
the XmlSerializer, which maintains
full schema and XML fidelity. The
XmlSerializer maps all optional
elements to two members: one
represents the data itself, and one
specifies whether or not the data is
actually present – this is the
“xxxSpecified” member. These
xxxSpecified members must be set to
true to enable the serialization of
the corresponding “actual data”
members.