A quick post regarding a simple problem you might find using Entity Framework with WCF. I have a simply little application which uses Entity Framework to access SQL Server and currently this all happens in a little client application.

I decided I wanted to move the DB access into a web service so I could look at writing an iPad or the likes front end to access it. All went well until I got the following exception

An error occurred while receiving the HTTP response to http://localhost:9095/MyService. This could be due to the service endpoint binding not using the HTTP protocol. This could also be due to an HTTP request context being aborted by the server (possibly due to the service shutting down). See server logs for more details.

My web service code looked like the following

public List<Plant> GetPlants()
{
   using (PlantsContext context = new PlantsContext())
   {
       return context.Plants.ToList();
   }
}

The problem is that the return is returning dynamic proxies, of the Plant type, not strictly real Plant types. What we need to do is change the code to add a line to turn off proxy creation

using (PlantsContext context = new PlantsContext())
{
   context.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled = false;
   return context.Plants.ToList();
}

And all works.