Cant connect to OpenFire via Sharp.XMPP

I have an instance of OpenFIre up and running and all is pretty smooth. I can connect to it via Spark as well as a variety of app.

When I wrote my app using the trial version of the Matrix SDK, the client connected perfectly. I am trying to move over to Sharp.XMPP and yet, whenever I try to connect to the server, I get the following error message :

“The XML stream could not be negotiated.”

When I drill down, I get to the folllwoing inner exception

{"‘�’, hexadecimal value 0x15, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 1."}

There seems to be some issue with the response encoding that Sharp.XMPP is expecting.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?