Why is my WCF web service presenting this object in a different namespace with different field names?

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It is stunning how many hours I’ve spent on this, how many solutions I’ve tried, how many links I’ve followed, and how many SO answers I’ve read that did not answer my question before finally finding that the answer was sitting right here on SO for more than 2 years!

The root problem is that the DocuSignEnvelopeInformation object is being serialized and deserialized by DataContractSerializer by default. This essentially serializes the private member variables that make up the object in their local namespace instead of the public properties. Infuriatingly, this is the default serializer for WCF services. If the auto-generated code of the service application at least marked the sample methods with [DataContractFormat] explicitly, we would have a clue to follow, but it is just an invisible default that you have to divine somehow.

The solution is to mark each method with [XmlSerializerFormat] in the interface. This replaces DataContractSerializer with XmlSerializer as the serializer for the method parameters:

[SoapHeaders]
[ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://www.docusign.net/API/3.0")]
public interface IDocusignEventListener
{
    [OperationContract]
    [XmlSerializerFormat]
    [FaultContract(typeof(ErrorMessageCollection), Action = Constants.FaultAction)]
    string DocuSignConnectUpdate(DocuSignEnvelopeInformation DocuSignEnvelopeInformation);
}

And just like that, the public properties, with their declared namespaces and everything I need, are now serialized instead of the private data!

For my specific concern, to receive calls from DocuSign’s Connect notification service, I still had one small namespace problem. The root level parameter, the DocuSignEnvelopeInformation, was still in the namespace of the method call. I’m not sure why. For now, I’m just putting the method call itself in the DocuSign API namespace (as you can see in the code sample above). The service now deserializes these calls correctly.

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