title: passing xml as a string to webservice causes complete failure
body: <p>I am hosting a .net webservice written in c#. In one of my web methods, I'm expecting a few inbound parameters, all of which are strings. The final string is actually a string of xml (I started out doing a dataset for this, but read this was a big no-no, so went this route instead).</p>
  
  <p>The xml (as a string) is incredibly simple.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;FriendsArray&gt;&lt;Friend&gt;&lt;FriendSocialID&gt;123456789&lt;/FriendSocialID&gt;&lt;FriendName&gt;Test Test&lt;/FriendName&gt;&lt;AvatarImage&gt;https://www.imagelocation.com&lt;/AvatarImage&gt;&lt;FriendGender&gt;&lt;/FriendGender&gt;&lt;/Friend&gt;&lt;/FriendsArray&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>With the <code>&lt;FriendsArray&gt;</code> being the bounder, and the <code>&lt;Friend&gt;</code> node being repeated n times. On the webservice side, I take this string, serialize it into xml and deal with the data.</p>
  
  <p>When the webservice is run locally on the server in Visual Studio, it works perfectly, no issues. When the webservice is run locally and attached to a test calling program that simply emulates passing these parameters, including the FriendArray to the webservice, again, right as rain, no issues, works perfectly.</p>
  
  <p>Real world scenario of calling the webservice foreign (either via emulation, like SoapUI or XMLSpy, or directly from the app that is meant to call it) it bombs the service. No error is returned, or empty response object, it completely fails, and returns nothing.</p>
  
  <p>The second I remove this FriendArray (its optional on the codebehind), it works perfectly.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some inherent issue to doing this the way I am trying to? If so, is there an easy alternate way that requires not a huge amount of recoding? Thanks!</p>