Question

When I add a Service Reference in Visual Studio to a service, it keeps adding this extendedProtectionPolicy to my Security Bindings, which on my Win7 machine it works fine. But when I deploy to Server 2003 it errors out saying unrecognized element in configuration file.

Removing the line <extendedProtectionPolicy policyEnforcement="Never" /> fixes the error.

This is the entire portion of unwanted web.config generated after an Add Service Reference (client side)

<security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential">
    <transport clientCredentialType="None" proxyCredentialType="None"
        realm="">
        <extendedProtectionPolicy policyEnforcement="Never" />
    </transport>
    <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default" />
</security>

Here is the behavior my service is using (iis7-host side)

<behavior name="GetHttpsIncludeFaults">
  <serviceCredentials>
    <userNameAuthentication 
      userNamePasswordValidationMode="Custom" 
      customUserNamePasswordValidatorType="MyCustomValidator, MyOtherAssembly"/>
  </serviceCredentials>
  <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" />
  <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />
</behavior>

I’d like to point out a few things. This happens in both VS2010 and VS2008. This happens in Consumer Projects of ASP.NET-MVC flavor AS WELL AS Windows Service / WPF Application.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell from information found on the internet and on Microsoft Connect more specifically, this is a known issue that has not been fixed yet.

You can work around this problem by using the Config Transforms feature of Visual Studio 2010. Config Transforms is a very useful feature that allows you to change the contents (such as connection strings) of config files automatically when deploying an application.

Unfortunately, at the present time Config Transforms are only supported for web.config files. This blogpost explains how to use the Config Transforms for app.config files however.

The following transform should fix your problem:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- For more information on using web.config transformation visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125889 -->
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
  <system.serviceModel>
    <bindings>
      <netTcpBinding>
        <binding>
          <security>
            <transport>
               <extendedProtectionPolicy xdt:Transform="Remove" />
            </transport>
        </binding>
      </netTcpBinding>
    </bindings>
  </system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

As you can see, it removes the <extendedProtectionPolicy/> node when deploying your application.