Sometimes adding a WCF Service Reference generates an empty reference.cs

Question

Sometimes adding a WCF Service Reference generates an empty reference.cs and I cannot reference the service anywhere in the project.

Has anyone encountered this?

Answer 1

Generally I find that it's a T4 codegen issue and most of the time it's because I've got a type name conflict it couldn't resolve.

If you right-click on your service reference and click configure and uncheck "Reuse Types in Referenced Assemblies" it'll likely resolve the issue.

If you were using some aspect of this feature, you might need to make sure your names are cleaned up.

Answer 2

When this happens, look in the Errors window and the Output window to see if there are any error messages. If that doesn't help, try running svcutil.exe manually, and see if there are any error messages.