"An error occurred while receiving the HTTP response to
http://xxx/. This could be due to the service endpoint binding not using the HTTP protocol.
This could also be due to an HTTP request context being aborted by the server
(possibly due to the service shutting down). See server logs for more details."

Got this message while trying to communicate to a WCF service I’ve built,

My initial assumption was that I’m not using the suitable security binders at both sides (server and client) .

First thing I tried was striping down the authentication configuration to “none” – the same exception was still thrown.

Secondly I tried to remove the service functionality to most basic by returning null, It works, I’ve returned the functionality but kept returning null and guess what - still worked.

At this point it was clear that the is some problem with the object that I try to return, I assumed that my Linq to Sql objects were not Serialized, indeed that was the cause, if you’re having this exception and use Linq to Sql object as a returned object – Its probably it.

Here is a very helpful “how to” on the subject: http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/147218.aspx 

(All that need to be done is changing the DataContext Serialization Mode to Unidirectional)