27 February 2006
Diagnosing Binary Formatter Version Incompatability Problems
Clients consuming remoting services hosted in IIS (and therefore
exposed via the HTTP channel) configured to use the binary formatter
may receive the following error:
An unhandled exception of type 'System.Runtime.Serialization. SerializationException' occurred in mscorlib.dll
Additional information: BinaryFormatter Version incompatibility. Expected Version 1.0. Received Version 1008738336.1684104552.
This article
explains that the above error is masking the original exception, and
describes a mechanism for tracing this exception. However, this tracing
process requires opening additional ports on the server, which may be
problematic if the application under inspection is hosted in a secured
environment.
An alternative to tracing the error is to configure
the remoting service to use the SOAP formatter instead of the binary
formatter, which will allow the original exception to propogate to the
client correctly. The SOAP formatter is the default formatter for the
HTTP channel, so assuming the remoting system is configured
declaratively, the following elements can be removed/commented out of
the configuration files:
Client
<configuration>
<system.runtime.remoting>
<application>
<channels>
<channel ref="http">
<clientProviders
>
<formatter
ref
="binary" />
</clientProviders
>
</channel>
</channels>
</application>
</system.runtime.remoting>
</configuration>
Server
<configuration>
<system.runtime.remoting>
<application>
<channels>
<channel ref="http"port="1234">
<serverProviders
>
<formatter
ref
="binary"
/>
</serverProviders
>
</channel>
</channels>
</application>
</system.runtime.remoting>
</configuration>
Also note that custom errors must be disabled
on the server for the original exception to propogate correctly:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="Off" />
</system.web>
</configuration>