ServiceContract class for an ASP.NET web service

Question

I want to invoke a web service in my C# client application. I want to be able to bind to this web service dynamically.

I am using the following code for dynamically calling a web service:

class Program
{
    interface IInterface

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        BasicHttpBinding bin = new BasicHttpBinding();

        EndpointAddress endPoint = new EndpointAddress("http://api.wxbug.net/webservice-v1.asmx");

        IInterface myInterface = ChannelFactory<IInterface>.CreateChannel(bin,endPoint);


    }
}

My question is, how to I generate a ServiceContract Interface for my web service? Is there any tool to autogenerate this? This is because my target web service is quite complex with lots of exposed methods, and I dont want to write the Service Contract Interfaces all my hand.

Answer 1

You can to right click your project and to select Add Service Reference; it'll grab your web service WSDL and to create your proxy classes.

Answer 2

The svcutil tool is what you use for this. This is also what gets run behind the scenes when you select "Add Service Reference" in Visual Studio.

If you are working in Visual Studio, then "Add Service Reference" will probably be easiest, as it should automatically start up your service in order to get the metadata.

If you can't or don't want to use Visual Studio, you'll need to make sure your service is up and running, and then use svcutil.exe (if you open a .Net Command Prompt it will be in the path variable). Using svcutil is sometimes necessary if you don't want to generate/overwrite the client configuration, or if you want to specify a specific class for the proxy to go in. There's also a handy switch in svcutil which will generate generic collections in the proxy, rather than defaulting to arrays.