In one of my day jobs I look after a system which has been around since 2010 (Early adopter of Microsoft Azure, developement started on .Net 3.5). The product has a number of Windows Communication Foundation(WCF) services hosted in an Azure CloudService.

A client built with .Net Core wanted to be able to call one of the services which was implemented using wsHttpBinding and TransportWithMessageCredential and this proved a bit more painful than expected…

I first tried the Visual Studio 2017 Microsoft WCF Web Service Reference Provider fromt the WCF Core Team.

The “add connected service” extension dialog allowed me to select an endpoint

But the code generation process failed

The error message wasn’t particularly helpful so I used the command line utility svcutil to generate client classes. Which I used to built a .net core client with and the associated .Net Core WCF NuGet packages.

The console application failed when I called the service with a “PlatformNotSupportedException”. After some searching I found that the .Net Core WCF libraries don’t support TransportWithMessageCredential (September 2017).

Some more searching lead to a StackOverflow article where an answer suggested using the SimpleSOAPClient NuGet package. I then created a new client using the generated classes as the basis for the ones used in my SimpleSOAPClient proof of concept(PoC)

[System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThroughAttribute()]
[System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("System.ServiceModel", "4.0.0.0")]
[System.ServiceModel.MessageContractAttribute(WrapperName="Redeem", WrapperNamespace="http://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08", IsWrapped=true)]
public partial class RedeemRequest
{
    [System.ServiceModel.MessageBodyMemberAttribute(Namespace="http://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08", Order=1)]
    public string voucherCode;

    [System.ServiceModel.MessageBodyMemberAttribute(Namespace="http://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08", Order=2)]
    public string merchantId;

    [System.ServiceModel.MessageBodyMemberAttribute(Namespace="http://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08", Order=3)]
    public string merchantReference;

    [System.ServiceModel.MessageBodyMemberAttribute(Namespace="http://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08", Order=4)]
    public string terminalId;

    public RedeemRequest()
    {
    }

    public RedeemRequest(string voucherCode, string merchantId, string merchantReference, string terminalId)
    {
        this.voucherCode = voucherCode;
        this.merchantId = merchantId;
        this.merchantReference = merchantReference;
        this.terminalId = terminalId;
    }
}

became

[XmlRoot("Redeem", Namespace = "http://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08")]
public partial class RedeemRequest
{
   [XmlElement("voucherCode")]
   public string voucherCode;
   [XmlElement("transactionAmount")]
   public decimal transactionAmount;
   [XmlElement("merchantId")]
   public string merchantId;
   [XmlElement("merchantReference")]
   public string merchantReference;
   [XmlElement("terminalId")]
   public string terminalId;
}

This client failed with a SOAPAction related exception so I fired up Telerik Fiddler and found that the header was missing. When I manually added the header in the request composer (after dragging one of my failed requests onto the composer tab) it worked.

I had a look at the code in the SimpleSOAPClient repository to see how to add a custom HTTP Header to a request.

RedeemRequest redeemRequest = new RedeemRequest()
{
   merchantId = "......",
   merchantReference = "......",
   terminalId = "......",
   voucherCode = "......",
};

using (var client = SoapClient.Prepare())
{
   client.HttpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("SOAPAction", "http://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08/IRedemptionProxyServiceV1/Redeem");
   var responseEnvelope = await client.SendAsync(
      "https://qwertyuiop.com/RedemptionProxy.svc",
      "https://qwertyuiop.com/services2011/08/IRedemptionProxyServiceV1/Redeem",
      SoapEnvelope.Prepare()
      .WithHeaders(KnownHeader.Oasis.Security.UsernameTokenAndPasswordText(".....", "......"))
      .Body(redeemRequest), ct);

      var response = responseEnvelope.Body<RedeemResponse>();

      Console.WriteLine("Redeem Result:{0}  Message:{1}", response.Result, response.messageText);
   }
}

After sorting out a few typos my request worked as expected. Only a couple of hours lost from my life, hopefully this post will help someone else.