Really liked the convenience of just firing up the web browser and typing in some values to test an ASMX web service, is this no longer possible with WCF?
+5
A:
You cannot have that, unfortunately.
But you do get the WCF Test Client instead!
It's available from your C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ directory, and it's a GUI tool to attach to WCF services and test them interactively. Quite handy.
As a benefit, the WCF Test Client can also deal with "complex" types, e.g. objects, that you want to pass into service calls - that was never possible on the ASMX test pages.
Otherwise, you'd have to use something like WCF Storm (.NET tool) or SoapUI (Java-based) for your SOAP services.
Marc
marc_s
2009-10-05 10:10:16
Is it possible to run the Test Client on a test or production server for quick debugging? (without VS installed)?
JL
2009-10-05 10:13:30
never attempted to do that, because it's a interactive GUI tool, and there's no separate install MSI for it. SoapUI (which is free, too) on the other hand does support command line testing of services, I believe - but it's Java-based, so you'd need at least a Java runtime on your test servers
marc_s
2009-10-05 10:16:12
You might want to have a look at WCFStorm, too - it's .NET and claims to support a range of testing scenarios.
marc_s
2009-10-05 10:17:28
marc_s, have you used WCFStorm? If so what did you think?
RichardOD
2009-10-05 10:20:23
@RIchardOD: it looked quite promising, but failed to deliver on a scenario I had: importing a service description from a WSDL on disk (not being able to interactively connect to it to get the WSDL). Haven't tried if the new 1.1 version will do that.
marc_s
2009-10-05 10:27:39
A:
The WCF Test Client is really useful. You can point it to your production or test servers, as well as localhost. It allows you to invoke your methods like the old ASMX web services did. You can view the resulting value nicely formatted, and can view the XML.
Mark
2010-10-03 16:04:47