WCF MessageContract Inheritance

Question

I am fairly new to WCF and just have a question on how to correctly get MessageContract inheritance working. A simplified version of my setup is as follows - a \"base\" mess

Answer 1

In the end I found this blog post which hit the nail on the head -

Unfortunately the way that contracts are expressed in WCF makes is very easy to forget what their purpose is: to define the messages send to the operation and being sent back from the operation. In reality you have to think “how would I express this data in XML?”. XML doesn’t support inheritance so whatever you put in the contract is going to have to have some way of mapping to XML. The data contracts used to define the messages are simply a .NET typed convenience for generating the XML for the data you want to pass – if you view them any other way you are destined for a world of pain. So think about the data you want to pass, not how it may happen to be represented in your business layer and design your DataContracts accordingly.

http://www.dotnetconsult.co.uk/weblog2/PermaLink,guid,a3775eb1-b441-43ad-b9f1-e4aaba404235.aspx

So I will be refactoring to provide an additional method with an explicit contract type. This will also allow me to clean up the service implementation by removing all the type checking.

Thanks for the assistance.