Question

In our production environment, our WCF services are serialized with the XMLSerializer. To do so our service interfaces have the [XMLSerializerFormat] attribute. Now, we need to change to DataContractSerializer but we must stay compatible with our existing clients. Therefore, we have to expose each service with both serializers.

We have one constraint: we don’t want to redefine each contract interface twice, we have 50 services contract interfaces and we don’t want to have

IIncidentServiceXml 
IIncidentServiceDCS
IEmployeeServiceXml 
IEmployeeServiceDCS
IContractServiceXml 
IContractServiceDCS

How can we do that?

---

More info

This is a description of what we have tried so far but I’m willing to try completely different approaches:

We tried to create all the endpoints by code in our own ServiceHostFactory class. Basically we create each endpoint twice. The problem is that at runtime, WCF complains that the service has two endpoints with the same contact name but with different ContractDescription instances. The message says we should use different contract names or reuse the same ContractDescription instance.

Other attempt:

We also tried to do it by using different Namespaces for each ContractDescription instance. That way we would keep the same contract interface (IIncidentService) but with two different namespaces:

http://ourcompany/XML/IIncidentService
http://ourcompany/DCS/IIncidentService

With that we were able to get farther but the service crashed with a weird exception:

An ExceptionDetail, likely created by IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true, whose value is:
System.InvalidOperationException: An exception was thrown in a call to a WSDL export extension: System.ServiceModel.Description.XmlSerializerOperationBehavior
contract: http://ourcompany.cs/XML:IUserServiceWCF ----> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at System.ServiceModel.Description.XmlSerializerMessageContractExporter.ExportFaults(Object state)
   at System.ServiceModel.Description.MessageContractExporter.ExportMessageContract()
   at System.ServiceModel.Description.XmlSerializerOperationBehavior.System.ServiceModel.Description.IWsdlExportExtension.ExportContract(WsdlExporter exporter, WsdlContractConversionContext contractContext)
   at System.ServiceModel.Description.WsdlExporter.CallExtension(WsdlContractConversionContext contractContext, IWsdlExportExtension extension)

Answer 1

Short answer is, you can’t, for exactly the reason your error message said, you can’t have too endpoints with the same name which effectively you are trying to do. I think you will have to do exactly what you say you don’t want to.

This might be your only option

The problem is that to specify a
service is to use the XmlSerializer
you need to declare the
[XmlSerializerFormat] attribute on the
service or the contract. Well since
we want to use the same for both
endpoints we can’t place it there, so
we are left with placing it on the
contract. However, when it boils down
to it, both endpoints are using the
same service and vicariously the same
contract right?

Well, it doesn’t have to be so. You
could have a contract A derive from
contract B, then have the service
implement contract A such that
everything in both contracts is part
of the service. For this example
though, contract B will be our
standard contract, and contract A will
be an interface that just defines the
[XmlSerializerFormat] attribute.

But I can’t promise you that will work with your existing clients code without changes.