Does adding a method to a WCF ServiceContract break existing clients?

Question

We have an existing ServiceContract

[ServiceContract(Namespace = \"http://somesite.com/ConversationService\")]
public interface IConversationService
{
               


        

Answer 1

No, I wouldn't expect that - adding new functionality / new service methods that does NOT alter any of the existing methods / function calls will not affect "old" clients. Of course, they won't know about the new methods until their proxies have been recreated from metadata, or adapted manually.

But existing calls should be unaffected, as long as their signature (the data they exchange) stays the same.

Marc