WCF common types not reused

Question

Hint: This questions has many duplicates, but none of the solutions works for me.

What I have is a web service and a client, both having references to a shared assem

Answer 1

I just went through an entire day trying to find out why the Types in my shared dll were not being reused when I added a Service Reference in VS2013. It turns out that the service had several problems related to serialization. I had a couple of enumerations that did not have the EnumMember attribute. The way I solved my issues were by trying the following steps:

1. Commenting out all operations (methods decorated with OperationContract attribute) in my ServiceContract that did not return atomic Types.
2. Then updating my Service Reference in my client project. I realized that the problem had been resolved when in my client project, I was able type "[MyServiceReferenceName]." and my Types did not appear in the [MyServiceReferenceName] namespace. I verified this by opening the generated XSD files in the XML Schema Browser just to be certain.
3. One by one, uncomment a method that was commented in Step 1. Then update your Service Reference each time to see if the types are or are not being resued.
4. Once you find the method that is causing the Service Reference to fail to reuse Types, go to each class for the the Types that are either input or output to the method. Check that all classes that you wish to serialize are decorated with the [DataContract] attribute. Ensure that all fields and properties are decorated with the [DataMember] attribute. Also, ensure enums are decorated with [DataContract] and that each enumeration value is decorated with [EnumMember].

I hope this helps others who are going through this frustrating process and this problem is not necessarily related to a shared dll. My issue was not really an issue with using Add or Update Service Reference. The problem lied with my entity (model) classes not being decorated with the proper attributes to notify the DataContractSerializer to serialize those types. It seems that if any part of serialization fails, adding the Service Reference adds all the Types.