24. September 2008
geoffrey
We just solved an interoperability problem for one of our customer that was trying to interoperate between Java & .Net. He was using jaxws to generate his java proxy code and wcf (svcutil) for the .Net proxy . The customer had worked based on a contract first approach and tested his contract through jaxws. When he tried to generate the proxy classes for his .Net app, using svcutil, the generated proxy class was missing all the collections. He also had a runtime error when trying to serialize some messages.
We rapidly found the cause of the missing collection. The customer had used maxOccurs="unbounded” in his wsdl, what is not supported by the DataContractSerializer used by svcutil. We replaced the unbounded with a 9999999 and suddenly the collections appeared in his proxy class.
But the runtime error was still there L
After some research we found an interesting article on MSDN describing the subset of WSDL supported by SVCUTIL. Based on the article we discovered that the customer had used a <choise> element in a complextype. This caused the SVCUTIL to use the old XMLSerializer in place of the DataContractSerializer of WCF. The XMLSerialzer made some strange construct in the proxy class causing runtime errors. So we simply removed the <choice> element and everything worked fine after that.
GVD