WCF Service - Backward compatibility issue

Question

I'm just getting into creating some WCF services, but I have a requirement to make them backward compatible for legacy (.NET 1.1 and 2.0) client applications.

I've managed to get the services to run correctly for 3.0 and greater clients, but when I publish the services using a basicHttpBinding endpoint (which I believe is required for the compatibility I need), the service refactors my method signatures. e.g.

public bool MethodToReturnTrue(string seedValue);

appears to the client apps as

public void MethodToReturnTrue(string seedValue, out bool result, out bool MethodToReturnTrueResultSpecified);

I've tried every configuration parameter I can think of in the app.config for my self-hosting console app, but I can't seem to make this function as expected. I suppose this might lead to the fact that my expectations are flawed, but I'd be surprised that a WCF service is incapable of handling a bool return type to a down-level client.

My current app.config looks like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>  
  <system.serviceModel>
    <services>
      <service behaviorConfiguration="MyServiceTypeBehaviors" Name="MyCompany.Services.CentreService.CentreService">
        <clear />
        <endpoint address="http://localhost:8080/CSMEX"    binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
        <endpoint address="http://localhost:8080/CentreService" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingName="Compatible" name="basicEndpoint" contract="MyCompany.Services.CentreService.ICentreService" />
      </service>
    </services>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="MyServiceTypeBehaviors" >
            <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
  </system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

Can anyone advise, please?

Answer 1

OK, we needed to resolve this issue in the short term, and so we came up with the idea of a "interop", or compatibility layer.

Baiscally, all we did was added a traditional ASMX web service to the project, and called the WCF service from that using native WCF calls. We were then able to return the appropriate types back to the client applications without a significant amount of re-factoring work. I know it was a hacky solution, but it was the best option we had with such a large legacy code-base. And the added bonus is that it actually works surprisingly well. :)