Unable to debug WCF service message

Question

I\'ve got a Visual Studio 2008 solution with a WCF service, and a client.

When I run my client, and call a method from my service I get a message saying \"Unable to

Answer 1

I've had a similar problem and it turns out to have been due to Windows Authentication not being enabled on the IIS site/virtual directory.

Have you tried setting the authentication mode to Integrated instead of Anonymous? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x8a5axew(VS.80).aspx

Answer 2

I also got the same problem. I changed in both client & service config files like

Compilation debug is set to true.

This worked for me.

Answer 3

It can also be that the same port number is used in IISExpress and IIS. If you are developing a WCF application in Visual Studio and IISExpress and then install the same application on your local IIS make sure not to use the same port number in IIS and IISExpress. Using the same port number will lead to this error message.

Answer 4

In my case the problem turned out to be something completely different. I had changed the name of an operation on the webservice and forgot to update the client. For some reason this resulted in the "Unable to automatically debug ..." error.

Answer 5

In your web service web.config ensure that compilation debug is set to true. That should fix your problem!

Answer 6

The other reason you might see this error (and I believe is the case for me) is if you're running in 64bit Windows. Apparently Visual Studio doesn't have any x64 debugger support.

You can work around this by changing the Platform Target for the consuming application:

Project Properties -> Build -> Change "Platform Target" to "x86".

Unfortunately this won't work for me as I'm trying to run in the Windows Azure Development AppFabric which seems to require everything to run in 64bit mode!