Programming WCF Services

Serialization

The data contract is part of the contractual operations the service supports, just like the service contract is part of that contract. The data contract is published in the service metadata, which allows clients to convert the neutral, technology-agnostic representation to the client’s native representation. Because objects and local references are CLR concepts, you cannot pass to and from a WCF service operation your CLR objects and references. Allowing you to do so would not just violate the core service-oriented principle discussed previously, but would also be impractical, since the object is comprised of both the state and the code manipulating it. There is no way of sending the code or the logic as part of a C# or Visual Basic method invocation, let alone marshaling it to another platform and technology. In fact, when passing an object (or a value type) as an operation parameter, all you really need to send is the state of that object, and you let the receiving side convert it back to its own native representation. Such an approach for passing state around is called marshaling by value. The easiest way to perform marshaling by value is to rely on the built-in support most platforms (.NET included) offer for serialization. The approach is simple enough, as shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1. Serialization and deserialization during an operation call

On the client side, ...