WCF Publish error: Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved:

Question

I have a WCF web service I am tryiong to publish to IIS. I can view the wsdl fine but cannot add the service in Visual Studio 2010 via the Add Service Reference menu. I get the following error:

Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved: 'http://localhost:4567/Service.svc?wsdl'.
The WSDL document contains links that could not be resolved.
There was an error downloading 'http://localhost:4567/Service.svc?xsd=xsd0'.
The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive.
Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host
Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved: 'http://localhost:4567/Service.svc'.
Content Type application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8 was not supported by service http://localhost:4567/Service.svc.  The client and service bindings may be mismatched.
The remote server returned an error: (415) Cannot process the message because the content type 'application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8' was not the expected type 'text/xml; charset=utf-8'..
If the service is defined in the current solution, try building the solution and adding the service reference again.

I works great locally but not if published to IIS.

Does anyone know what is causing this problem? Here is my web.config, I am new to WCF so might have missed something out, thanks:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>

  <system.web>
    <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />
  </system.web>
  <system.serviceModel>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior>
          <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, set the value below to false and remove the metadata endpoint above before deployment -->
          <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
          <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, set the value below to true.  Set to false before deployment to avoid disclosing exception information -->
          <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true"/>
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
  </system.serviceModel>
 <system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"/>
  </system.webServer>
  <connectionStrings>

  </connectionStrings>
</configuration>

Answer 1

I truly wish Microsoft would put better diagnostics in place to give us more targeted information on WCF configuration errors either at at build or runtime - I don't care which, but it has wasted so many hours of development time over the years it's unreal.

</rant>

For me, this ridiculously generic error's cause was this:

<endpoint address="mexTcp" binding="mexTcpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/>

Should have been this:

<endpoint address="mex" binding="mexTcpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/>

Two hours of fart-arsing around trying to enable Net.Tcp for something that could have easily been highlighted in the IDE. Two hours!!!

Answer 2

As this is one of the first posts google shows up for this error, I want to participate with my solution:

I got a similar error while changing code in a system that was working well, but updating the reference on my development system failed. The reference is located inside a silverlight project and is related to a WCF integrated in the surrounding website (standard configuration I guess).

My error message included

"WCF Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved: 'Some funny path'. The content type text/html; charset=utf-8 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8)."

My website uses authorization roles, thats where the problem/solution was based. For updating the service reference I had to allow all users:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <!--<authorization>
            <allow users="*"/>            
        </authorization>-->
        <authorization>
            <deny users="?"/>
            <allow roles="role-1,role-2"/>
            <deny users="*"/>
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Answer 3

Check the answer here MSDN forum

When you define a net tcp protocol you need to ensure you are using IMetadataExchange contract defined in an endpoint contract. The service behaviour for this also needs to contain the <serviceMetadata /> tag. From what i have understood, this is pretty much boilerplate code for your config if you are wanting to host and generate proxys / discover in VS.

<endpoint address="mex" binding="mexTcpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />