Content Type text/xml; charset=utf-8 was not supported by service

Solution 1:

First Google hit says:

this is usually a mismatch in the client/server bindings, where the message version in the service uses SOAP 1.2 (which expects application/soap+xml) and the version in the client uses SOAP 1.1 (which sends text/xml). WSHttpBinding uses SOAP 1.2, BasicHttpBinding uses SOAP 1.1.

It usually seems to be a wsHttpBinding on one side and a basicHttpBinding on the other.

Solution 2:

Do not forget check the bindings-related code too. So if you wrote:

BasicHttpBinding binding = new BasicHttpBinding();

Be sure that all your app.config files contains

<endpoint address="..."
          binding="basicHttpBinding" ...

not the

<endpoint address="..."
          binding="wsHttpBinding" ...

or so.

Solution 3:

I've seen this behavior today when the

   <service name="A.B.C.D" behaviorConfiguration="returnFaults">
        <endpoint contract="A.B.C.ID" binding="basicHttpBinding" address=""/>
    </service>

was missing from the web.config. The service.svc file was there and got served. It took a while to realize that the problem was not in the binding configuration it self...

Solution 4:

I saw this problem today when trying to create a WCF service proxy, both using VS2010 and svcutil.

Everything I'm doing is with basicHttpBinding (so no issue with wsHttpBinding).

For the first time in my recollection MSDN actually provided me with the solution, at the following link How to: Publish Metadata for a Service Using a Configuration File. The line I needed to change was inside the behavior element inside the MEX service behavior element inside my service app.config file. I changed it from

<serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>  

to

<serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" policyVersion="Policy15"/>

and like magic the error went away and I was able to create the service proxy. Note that there is a corresponding MSDN entry for using code instead of a config file: How to: Publish Metadata for a Service Using Code.

(Of course, Policy15 - how could I possibly have overlooked that???)

One more "gotcha": my service needs to expose 3 different endpoints, each supporting a different contract. For each proxy that I needed to build, I had to comment out the other 2 endpoints, otherwise svcutil would complain that it could not resolve the base URL address.