Huh? How are these two things related at all?

Well ... On last Friday I had a terrible Hard Drive crash, eliminating about 10 days worth of FIFI coding. That resulted - obviously - a lot of unhappy coding over the weekend. Fortunately, I was able to redo pretty much all code loss by Monday morning... which shows that trying to get a completely new MessageEncoder working with WCF is a lot of reengineering and much less actual coding (thank the gods of Redmond Kobol for stop and continue in Visual Studio).

Anyway, with some substantial help from Paul and my rejuvenated FIFI code, we got RPC/encoded working.

As for doc/lit: the deserialization framework in .NET 2.0 is quite complex. Having said that, here is a little question for anybody knowledgable about the XmlFormatter (and/or DataContractSerializer et al.):

How does WCF deserialize the SOAP message Body exactly?

If you know the answer, please let me know.

Coming back to the original question: a hard drive crash prompted me to recode portions of FIFI, enabling me essentially to dig a little deeper into the WCF stack. And the glass is half-full.