Setting WCF DataContract namespace using ContractNamespace attribute

Question

In designing my service, I decided that I wanted to customize the namespaces that appeared in the resulting WSDL.

For the DataContracts, i came across the ContractNamespace attribute which seemed a nice shortcut alternative to setting the same namespace explicitly for every DataContract. My initial attempt looked like this:

[assembly:ContractNamespace("http://types.mycompany.com/2010/08/03")]
namespace MyCompany.MyContracts
{
    [DataContract]
    //...multiple datacontract classes here
}

To my surprise, this did not work. After much tinkering, I was only successful when I finally set the ClrNamespace property of the attribute equal to my CLR namespace (MyCompany.MyContracts in the example). So something like this

[assembly:ContractNamespace("http://types.mycompany.com/2010/08/03",
          ClrNamespace="MyCompany.MyContracts")]

My question is: why did this not work the first way? My expectation was that by not specifying a CLR namepsace, this attribute would affect all datacontracts assembly-wide.

Answer 1

If I'm not mistaken, if the ClrNamespace is ommitted, then the contract namespace setting applies to objects in the global namespace.