You had me at "Hello World" : WCF

The server did not provide a meaningful reply; this might be caused by a contract mismatch, a premature session shutdown or an internal server error

HelloWorld — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:30:09 GMT

I am playing around with WCF, and I got that error message above. Searching did not really help in defining what was going on. And yes, it was working on my previous test environment. :)

Luckily, I still had one of my test method, which just ping the service and did nothing else. That method works, so at least I know that the problem was not with the service, only with this operation.

The problematic parameter took a parameter, an array of byte. Out of curiosity, I sent an empty array, lo behold, it worked.

It turned out that my test data was too big, I used a file to create that array of byte, and it worked great. I lost that small file and randomly picked a file. I did not realize the file was 6 GB in size. After replacing that file with a smaller one, it worked.

So, if you see that error above and you are passing an array of byte as parameter, probably this will help you to quickly fixed the issue.

Disclaimer, I do not think this is the only cause for that error.

Replacing ASMX Web Service with WCF Web Service

HelloWorld — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:38:10 GMT

I found a good article about replacing ASMX web wervice with WCF web service here (ASMX to WCF migration). Very cool, and my client application do not need to be recompiled.

Just one thing that I notice, I believe on step 3, instead of XmlSerializerAttribute it should be XmlSerializerFormat. Have fun!

WCF Webcast

HelloWorld — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:04:01 GMT

Michele Leroux Bustamante made fifteen great Webcasts, hosted by msdn. If you are learning WCF, I highly recommend these Webcasts and her book, Learning WCF.

http://www.dasblonde.net/2007/06/24/WCFWebcastSeries.aspx