WCF and Anonymous Types

Question

I want to return an anonymous type over WCF. Is this possible?

Answer 1

You cannot use anonymous types, but maybe you are talking about WCF and untyped messages?

There is an option in WCF to just define a parameter of type Message (and possibly a return value of the same type). This is just the raw message that goes to WCF (and comes back from it).

I can't find much good information out there - there's some documentation on MSDN, but the best I've seen so far is Kurt Claeys' blog post WCF : Untyped messages on WCF operations.

I would not recommend using this approach - it's a lot more grunt work to handle the message contents directly yourself and that's what WCF is trying to spare us from - but if you absolutely, positively have to tweak every bit of your message - this seems like the way to go.

Marc

Answer 2

You can't return an anonymous type from any method, can you? So why would you be able to return it from WCF?