At work we are are constantly using Telerik components. To be honest, sometimes we also use them, where a plain ASP.NET control would be just as fine. Anyway, we use RadComboBox control as auto-complete fields for various search filters etc. Normally, we have RadComboBox connected to regular .NET Web service and it works like a charm. But, to make things a little less dull, I decided to write a WCF service and connect it to RadComboBox.

First, I checked if RadComboBox supports WCF services and it appears it does, as long as it is a Ajax-enabled WCF service. Second, I want my WCF service to be part of existing web application and not a standalone project as no other project will use it. So, I created a simple Ajax-enabled WCF service with one method which returned exactly the same string for every call. Nothing fancy. I connected WCF to RadComboBox, and it worked like a charm.

However, then I remembered that our test and production servers enforce SSL encryption, which means that by default my application will run on https. I thought it would be no problem, but there is no way that one can configure RadComboBox and Ajax-enabled WCF service to connect via https. To be honest, this is not fault of RadComboBox control. It is due to the fact that Ajax-enabled WCF service must use webHttpBinding or it doesn’t work. Well it does, but it returns an encoded blob. Anyway, with hours spent on fiddling with configurations of both app and IIS, I finally gave up and created a plain old regular .NET Web service. It may not be as fancy, or interesting, but it at least works.