Developing against a web service

Question

My superior once told me that a bad way of calling a web service or a wcf service is treating it like its a referenced assembly i.e. instantiate a class and call the methods.

I don't see any other way of doing it though. Are there some best practices that I should be following when I interact with external web services / services or is this fine:

public class ServiceProxyManager : IServiceProxyManager
{
    private Service1Soap _externalService;

    public ServiceProxyManager()
    {
        _externalService = new Service1SoapClient();
    }
}

Answer 1

It's cleaner if you inject the web service into the code that uses it. That way you can write tests by mocking out the interface. I've had a lot of success with that approach in the past.

Of course something will have to create an interface of the service, but that doesn't have to be the code that calls into it...