Atlanta Visit, SOAP Formatter Issue

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(note: I posted this originally on Thursday night right after a reboot of blogs.msdn.com but it disappeared from the database; some aggregators did pick it up so I didn't imagine it. Sorry if you are getting this twice)

This week Brad Abrams, Kit George, Caludio Caldata and I have been in Atlanta meeting with customers. It's been a blast! We've met with folks with all combinations of .NET technology and languages, as well as heterogenous shops with J2EE and .NET. It's been very educational. We've also met with the local user group.

Whidbey is locked down to the point where what I'm really interested in is things like stress and compat. These things will tell us when we can confidently ship the final bits. So one of the things we have been trying while here is to migrate applications to V2.0 to test out our compat story. 

I ran into a couple of interesting issues this afternoon at one site. In the first we found that a date time value wasn't deserialized properly in a server app. A quick phone call to Matt Tavis and we found out that V1.1 -> V2.0 SOAP remoting is not supported. The work around is to switch to the binary formatter instead, or roll both apps forward to V2.0. You should provide your feedback on this decision now if you think it'll cause you any issues.

The next issue was another deserialization issue this time in XML. I wound up using windbg to stop on the exception and find the content in memory from the web service call. I'm waiting for Brad to rib me in his blog as evidentally I appeard to be enjoying being a dev again too much (2 hours passed by pretty quickly while poking around in various debuggers). Based on these issues, I'm very interested in community feedback on your serialization usages (Web Services or otherwise).  

I should also point out that most apps are working great when just rolled forward to V2.0 and that we are forcing these apps to V2.0 for testing purposes. Side by side is working very well by default. We're headed back to Redmond tomorrow. Thanks Atlanta!