Adding service reference (inside a Silverlight class library) of a WCF service that uses business objects from a referenced libarary creates a proxy without the service client.

Question

Hi All,

I have a typical setup. The solution contains a regular .NET class library for business objects, A WCF project, a silverlight project and supporting web-app project, and some silverlight class libraries. The classes in my business class library are all marked with the "[serializable]" attribute. The WCF service has a method that would return a List of one of the objects in my business class library. When I add reference of this service in my silverlight class library project, the proxy is generated without any errors, but this proxy does not contain any definition of the service or the service interface itself. It does contain the definition of the complete object model contained inside the business object I am returning from the service, but without the actual reference to the service client I am unable to make a call to the service. Is there an issue with the design or implementation of this setup?

Answer 1

Have you added the attributes [OperationContract] and [ServiceContract] to your WCF interface?

Answer 2

Make sure that your business object is marked as a [DataContract]. Any objects that it contains also need to be marked with that attribute as well.

EDIT: Since you don't want to make modifications to the 3rd party code, perhaps it's possible to create a manual proxy for your service, including the types defined there.

Here's an article all about using WCF the Manual Way.

Answer 3

Have you tried using the slsvcutil.exe tool from the command-line to generate the proxy instead of using "Add Service Reference"? That may at least spit out some warnings while generating the proxy to help you track down your problem, and gives you greater control over various options for the proxy.