WCF Casting results in serialization error

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C#

WCF

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to build a WCF service that implements the following interface.

[ServiceContract]
public interface IWebService
{
	[OperationContract]
	void DoWork(BaseClass argument);
}

I also have the following classes:

public class BaseClass
{
    private string[] elements;
}

public class SuperClass : BaseClass
{
    public string Name
    {
        get{return elements[0];}
        set{elements[0]=value;}
    }
}

But when I consume the WCF service with the following client, it results in an error:

static void Main()
{
    WebserviceClient _client = new WebserviceClient();
    _client.Open();
    
    SuperClass argument = new SuperClass();
    argument.Name = "Joe";
    
    _client.DoWork((BaseClass)argument);
}

There was an error while trying to serialize parameter http://tempuri.org/:argument. The InnerException message was 'Type 'SuperClass' with data contract name 'SuperClass:http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/SharedTypes' is not expected. Consider using a DataContractResolver or add any types not known statically to the list of known types - for example, by using the KnownTypeAttribute attribute or by adding them to the list of known types passed to DataContractSerializer.'.  Please see InnerException for more details.

I know I could add the type 'SuperClass' to the list of knowntypes. But that is not my intention. I want to build a lot of wrapper classes around this baseClass that are easy to use for me/other users. But these wrapper classes are nothing more than BaseClasses.

The above example code is a simplified version of my real project.

Does anyone know what I have to do to make this work?

Kind regards,