Do I have to worry about escaping XML reserved characters before I return a DataContract object from an OperationContract in WCF?

Question

Hi,

I am pretty inexperienced with WCF. I have a DataContract that implements the IExtensibleDataObject interface. Some of the members of this object are populated from freetext input and could contain XML reserved characters ('>', for example). I imagine that I get escaping of these characters for free with WCF, but I have been looking around and could not find anything commenting on this one way or another. Is this the case?

I have set my service to log the messages that it sends and receives for viewing in the Trace Viewer. Part of a message that my service returns looks like this:

<sInstructions>"></sInstructions>

Now, I have a couple questions about this.

1) Is it actually transmitting "> and just showing it in a more readable form in the trace viewer?

2) If it is actually is transmitting ">, is this legal XML?