[C#] Best practice on creating a webservice wrapper in VS2010?

Question

Hi there,

Background - We are consuming a webservice issued by a telco operator. Any apps consuming their WS needs to be tested on their staging IP, and this creates an unpredictable overheads on our project timeline as the turnaround time of the operator varies case by case but usually long, without mentioning the red tapes one has to go thru.

Can we create a wrapper for this WS such that we only need to pass their staging test at once, after that any new apps will consume the service offer by this wrapper instead of coupling with their own copy of the WS calls?

So essentially it's a web service wrapping another web service, however they will be hosted on the same server.

I'm using VS2010 but the production server is an IIS6 on WS2K3.

When I create a new project in VS2010... shall I give WCF Service Application a try?

Or just stick to ASP.NET Web Application?

I have rule out the possibility to do it as a Windows Service but I could be wrong.

Any helps appreciated.

TIA

Answer 1

You could simply create a standalone Windows Forms desktop app and add a web reference to that web service.

Answer 2

To expose a service to another applications (wrapping the staging WS), I would use WCF if in WS2003 has 3.5 Framework (or 4) installed. Using WCF you can expose many endpoints - such as TCP if it's affordable in your enviroment - and is the evolution of simple ASP.NET WebServices / Remoting.

I would try not to use Windows Services, since it's not flexible and can't be exposed as a service.