What is the default WCF Binding?

Question

I've been struggling for a few days with this problem, learning a lot of things on bindings in the process. One thing puzzles me, though: various links (see this or that for example) explicitly state "By default, WCF project is created using WsHttpBinding", but that's not what I see. This is what I do:

1. Open Visual Studio 2010 and choose New Project / Visual C# / WCF Service Application
2. Don't touch anything inside the code, set a local IIS Url for the service (say http://localhost/WcfService7)
3. Open soapUI and choose File / New Soap UI Project / enter the url of the newly created wsdl: http://localhost/WcfService7/Service1.svc?wsdl, not touching any other option
4. Interface properties: SOAP Version = SOAP 1.1, Binding = "BasicHttpBinding_IService1" (even though it's just a name, it's a hell of a hint)
5. Open Altova XmlSpy and choose SOAP / Create new SOAP Request / enter the url of the wsdl / select any operation
6. SOAP / Change SOAP Request parameters / Ensure that "Send as SOAP+XML (SOAP 1.2)" is checked

7. SOAP / Send request to server: i get the errors

   HTTP error: could not POST file ‘/WcfService7/Service1.svc’ on server ’localhost’ (415)

   Error sending the soap data to ‘http://localhost/WcfService7/Service1.svc’ HTTP error: could not POST file ‘/WcfService7/Service1.svc’ on server ’10.51.0.108’ (415)

Any explanations? Thanks

Answer 1

When hosting WCF service in IIS (using WCF Service application project template) with default .svc file (without changing its service host factory) the default binding is basicHttpBinding. If you want to change default binding to wsHttpBinding you must use:

<protocolMapping>
    <add scheme="http" binding="wsHttpBinding"/>
</protocolMapping>

In your service's configuration file but it will not solve your problem because you don't need wsHttpBinding and as I remember Altova XmlSpy is not able to send valid request for wsHttpBinding because it supports only basic SOAP stack without WS-* protocols.