WCF and custom text encoding - messy business

Question

I have a really weird WCF problem here...

We're connecting to a crappy third-party web service; it was a nightmare to even get it going, we had to create a custom WCF binding since those guys decided to use "ISO-8859-1" as their text encoding (instead of UTF-8 like everyone else on the web), and the other settings were messy, too - and not documented anywhere, of course...

It's been working ok for a while now, but suddenly, some of our data coming back in mangled up. We expect to get back names of places, and being in Switzerland, some of those have German umlauts in them. But for the past two or three months, we suddenly get back

Hünibach

instead of the proper

Hünibach

So the ü (u umlaut) is mangled.

No problem, I figured they finally switched to UTF-8, and I changed my custom binding to use UTF-8 as its text encoder instead of ISO-8859-1 - but no luck - no I'm getting:

EXCEPTION: System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityException
The HTTP request was forbidden with client authentication scheme 'Basic'.

What the f????? The service is protected by a username/password which we pass in using the ClientCredentials of WCF. Seems that changing the text encoding somehow messes up the credentials !?!?! Weird.....

OK - back to ISO-8859-1, and I just tried to interpret the response payload as UTF-8 - again no luck :-( Tried with UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-7 even, Unicode, BigEndianUnicode - all to no avail.

So how on earth do I get back my proper umlauts, and still be able to call that bloody service... works just fine in SoapUI, btw.....

Any ideas?? I'm desperately grasping at any straws you might throw me!!

Answer 1

Try inspecting the data you are getting back and see what numeric codes they are using to represent it. Umlaut is one of those characters in 8859-1 that shares code with other characters.

See second para in - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9C#Typography

Answer 2

Actually, I finally figured out what the trouble was.

For some reason, changing the sample CustomTextEncoder (provided by Microsoft in the WCF & WF samples) to use UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 doesn't work.

On the other hand, ripping out the custom text encoder from my custom binding and just using the standard TextMessageEncoder that WCF provides from the get go (which uses UTF-8 by default) did work.

Don't ask me why.... that's just the facts I found.....