WCF support in Mono

Question

I am trying to figure out what is and isn't supported for WCF under Mono. I have read the WCF Development Documentation on the Mono Project page.

For anyone with experience using WCF under Mono, are there any gotchas I should be aware of?

Answer 1

• Not sure if you saw this post on the Mono mailing list (it has a nice long attachment with details).

• Also, there is this thread discussing exactly the question you have asked.

You might be able to find more by searching for WCF on Mono mailing lists.

Answer 2

There is quite a good discussion of what you can and cannot do in Mono, in Scott Hanselman's podcast.

The podcast also contains references to other sources of information. For example:

• Mono Migration Analyser http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA
• Mono Tools for Visual Studio http://go-mono.com/monovs/

If you listen from min 13 to 14, they say that mono does not support WCF. This seams to be in contradiction to the information in your link. It appears that they have moved the development of WCF for mono from 'olive' to the core, but it is not finished yet.

Answer 3

The most comprehensive, concise place to look is probably here:
http://go-mono.com/status/

For example, look at System.ServiceModel, etc. for WCF status. You can look class by class at the features that you need.

We're using Mono's WCF stack to host some basic http services on Linux and a few things don't work (such as serving up meta data), but overall it's working well enough for us already. It successfully allows Windows and Mac deployments to make service calls to it, and it also successfully allows Silverlight clients to make calls to it.