German umlauts in EndpointAddress with net.tcp

Question

I'm trying to make instance of class EndpointAddress where parameter contains German umlaut.

For example:

EndpointAddress endpointAddress = new EndpointAddress("net.tcp://süd:8001/EmployeeService");

It always throws exception that given uri cannot be parsed. I have tried to replace the umlaut with an encoded value, but I get same exception:

Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed.

Did anyone had same problem before? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The parser probably doesn't know how to work with internationalized domain names (IDN). If you want to have such hostnames, you're going to have to do the Punycode encoding yourself. I haven't used it, but there's a core function IdnMapping.GetAscii that looks suitable — something like

EndpointAddress endpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(
    "net.tcp://" + IdnMapping.GetAscii("süd") + ":8001/EmployeeService"
);

will perhaps work (forgive me if it doesn't, C# isn't my language).

Answer 2

Just as an extra note. WCF added support for IDN (both for hosting service + WCF client talking to a service with IDN name) in .Net 4.5. This documentation has some information about this.

So this exception will disappear as soon as you compile your app against .net 4.5

Answer 3

As suggested you have to enable IRI and IDN parsing before using this kind of URI.

Add this to your app.config:

 <configuration>
     <uri>
         <idn enabled="All" />
         <iriParsing enabled="true" />
     </uri>
 </configuration>