Data Contracts in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

I’ve been going over data contracts for WCF lately and wanted to post a few specifics. One issue I ran into recently was odd, as it included an enumeration that needed to be included in part of a data contract. I had tagged the enumeration with the [DataContract] attribute but I was receiving an odd issue about the service disconnecting. The error message I was getting was something like this:

I had read, or thought via failed comprehension, that I could just tag an enumeration with [DataContract] as below.

   1:  [DataContract] 

   2:  public enum Priority 

   3:  { 

   4:      Low, 

   5:      Medium, 

   6:      High 

   7:  } 

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

As it turns out though, the [EnumMember] attribute needs added to the enumeration.

   1:  [DataContract] 

   2:  public enum Priority 

   3:  { 

   4:      [EnumMember] 

   5:      Low, 

   6:      [EnumMember] 

   7:      Medium, 

   8:      [EnumMember] 

   9:      High 

  10:  } 

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

After I added that, smooth sailing resumed. So don’t just tag the enumeration, tag the members too. I’m also working on some other notes from my reintroduction to WCF (I’ve done a ton of work with it in the past) so stay tuned for that.