WCF service getting MessageContract error on server 2003 and not other locations

Question

I have a WCF service I am connecting to. It works fine from my local machine when testing. Also works fine on one test location that is running windows server 2008.

one of our production machines is running windows server 2003, and I get this error message:

The operation 'theOperation' could not be loaded because it has a parameter or return  type of type System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message or a type that has MessageContractAttribute and other parameters of different types. When using System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message or types with MessageContractAttribute, the method must not use any other types of parameters.

I have looked into the error and know what it means but I'm very confused because it works on 2 locations and not the other. Is there something about server 2003 or some other setting I may be missing that is causing the issue on our production server? The code is exactly the same.

Edit: I am using .net 4.0

Answer 1

2003? What framework are you using?

I'm not familiar with the error but you may turn on logging on your service, by adding the following section to your app.config on your service (I grant you don't host in IIS).

<system.diagnostics>
    <sources>
      <source name="System.ServiceModel"
              switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing"
              propagateActivity="true" >
        <listeners>
          <add name="xml"/>
        </listeners>
      </source>
      <source name="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging">
        <listeners>
          <add name="xml"/>
        </listeners>
      </source>
      <source name="myUserTraceSource"
              switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing">
        <listeners>
          <add name="xml"/>
        </listeners>
      </source>
    </sources>
    <sharedListeners>
      <add name="xml"
           type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener"
           initializeData="c:\locationofourlogfile\wcf.svclog" />
    </sharedListeners>
</system.diagnostics>

This will log to the location provided in the config, you may open this file in svcutil, and maybe get some wiser. SvcUtil is located in your winsdk folder.

Hope it helps.