In VS 2008, there is a problem with reusing collection types when you configure a WCF service and wish to “Reuse types in all refrenced assemblies”.  If you want to pass collections around via your WCF service, a Visual Studio will create a proxy class for each collection type regardless whether your collection type is included within referenced assemblies or not.  I will show you how to bypass this shortcoming.

Fiddler is the tool of choice when it comes to inspecting WCF messages that utilize an HTTP transport.  In a previous post I mentioned that HTTP WCF messages should be in encoded in a binary format to decrease their size.  The problem you run into when encoding your WCF messages is that when Fiddler attempts to inspect an encoded message, it’s not in a readable format.  To resolve this limitation, you can download a free plug-in which will add an inspector to Fiddler to decode binary WCF message.  Using this new inspector, you can inspect binary encoded WCF messages freely from within Fiddler.

Silverlight 3 offers us some new features when it comes to WCF web services.  In Silverlight 2, BasicHttpBinding was the only supported binding.  This essentially encodes your serialized objects in clear text and sends them over an HTTP transport.  Because the objects were sent as clear text, the message size could get out-of-hand.  When sending data across HTTP/Internet, you obviously want to decrease the size as this will improve performance of your client application.  Silverlight 3 offers the ability to create custom bindings which support the ability to encode your WCF web service messages as a binary format.