I had a WCF service secured with SSL, using wsHttpBinding, Message security mode, and UserName authentication. Everything worked find because I created the client app in VisualStudio and it automatically generated the appropriate tags in web.config. I was able to connection, authenticate and call methods without issue.
But now I need to adjust the service to allow clients of other technologies to connect to it…more specifically PHP. PHP can’t connect to a service that uses wsHttpBinding. It has to be basicHttpBinding because it conforms to a broader standard.
The first thing to do is change system.serviceModel/services/service binding attribute to “basicHttpBinding”. Then create a <basicHttpBinding> node under system.serviceModel/bindings. Because we can’t use the Message security mode with basicHttpBinding, it needs to be changed to TransportWithMessageCredential. And that’s basically it for the service.
Now just publish it, connect to it from your client and call it a day. Well it didn’t go that smoothly for me. My client app I create for the original wsHttpBinding service was griping with an error: The remote server returned an error: (504) Gateway Timeout. Update the service reference? Nope that didn’t help. Remove and create the service reference? Nope, same error. So then I tried playing with the service configuration to no avail.
Finally I decided to read the stack trace and saw “There was no endpoint listening at https://myremoteservername/service.svc that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action.” Weird, how did it know the name of my server? I went back to my client’s web.config and looked at the endpoint VS created with I added the service reference. Indeed the address contained the server name! I changed it to the publicly accessible domain name and it works.
For some reason, when VS references a service with basicHttpBinding, it uses the server name. But I have no idea how it got the name in the first place. When adding the reference, I entered the public (correct) .svc url.
I’ll have to check with our network guy about it but I’m happy it’s finally working.
Of code and life...but mostly code 