Wcf interoperability wish list

@YaronNaveh

If you have already filled your duty please share it in the comments. Here is my take.

My WCF 4.0+1 interoperability wishlist:

Be more forgiving. In so many cases I have sent a good request to the server, got a correct response, and had to workaround a non happy proxy complaining on "timestamp missing in the response", "expected to get serialized token" etc. If I do not explicitly require this I do not want Wcf to do it for me.

Low level extension point. Ok, so I got a wrong certificate reference from the other party, I just need to change it in the incoming message so Wcf will not throw some exception. I googled for "changing wcf message" and got a nice link about message inspector. Too bad it cannot change the security applied message. I had to use a custom encoder, which is really much harder to implement / maintain.

Better error messages. When you compile a VS project you sometimes get an error message like this:

The type X could not be found (are you missing an assembly reference?)

I wish Wcf would also have this. For exmple:

The EncryptedKey clause was not wrapped with the required encryption token 'System.IdentityModel.Tokens.X509SecurityToken'. Are the client and server certificates in sync?

I have actually posted a series of posts titled "Cryptic WCF error messages" which tries to supply the most common cause for many errors.

Better trace / debug. Wcf trace is really great and today we can already debug into the framework. So what do I want here? I'm not sure yet, I just know these are essential tools for interoperability and I want them easier and better.


And more...

In addition there are some lower level requirements that are not supported today. Not all are priority zero, but I have seen all of them in interoperability scenarios.

Encrypting / Signing specific elements in the message body (e.g. using xpath)

Control over xml signature algorithm / transformations

Support of the DSA algorithm

User / Pass authentication at the message level with a password hash + control over the nonce / created fields

WS-Addressing August 2004

Mime, SwA, Dime (probably a bigger effort than the others...)

Control over the security element mustUnderstand attribute

Native support for JKS (Java Key Store)

Keeping alive binding converter from the evil Azure trial expiration...

Some people require to use specific namespace prefixes in their Xml. Don't ask me what is it good for, but Wcf should allow it. I have seen this especially in interoperability scenarios.

Better coverage of wsdls - even today not all are parsed or pass code generation. Some examples last back to the old the 2.0 days and are easy to identify and fix.

I'm pretty sure I have more somewhere but this should be enough for one version :)

@YaronNaveh

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