What is the process involved in viewing a webservice in a browser from within visual studio?

Question

I have created a new VS2008 ASP.Net Web service project, with the default name WebService1. If I right click on the Service1.asmx file and select 'View in Browser' what are the processes that go on to make this happen? I am asking because I have a situation where when I run this from a visual studio project started in our development shell (which sets up a common build environment) I cannot get the web service to show up in the browser.

It starts the asp.net development server and creates a single file:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\c43ddc22\268ae91b\hash\hash.web

but when I start it from a stand alone project i get a whole slew of files in here:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\edad4eee\d198cf0e\App_Web_defaultwsdlhelpgenerator.aspx.cdcab7d2.vicgkf94.dll

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\edad4eee\d198cf0e\service1.asmx.cdcab7d2.compiled

etc etc

I am trying to debug this but not really getting anywhere. i have inspected the output from VS but the only option I get is for the build output, which is basic and doesn't really contain any information that is useful. I have tried running both versions with DebugView running but no output there either.

I would like to know if there are any log files I could look at, or if anyone has any suggestions on how I might be able to debug what is going wrong here?

For completeness the output I get when it doesn't work is:

Parser Error Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. Parser Error Message: Could not create type 'WebService1.Service1'. Source Error: Line 1: Source File: /Service1.asmx Line: 1 Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3603; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3082

Answer 1

Ok, not sure that its perfect but I found a resolution to this issue. the problems seems to be that the development shell redirects the <OutputPath> of the projects visual studio is building, and this was causing problems as, although the dependencies of the web service project were being copied into the $(ProjectDir)Bin\ directory, the actual webservice dll itself was not. The solution (workaround?) seems to be to add this to the post build event command line:

xcopy /y "$(TargetPath)" "$(ProjectDir)Bin\"

Then i am able to right click on the .asmx file and select view in browser and everything works as expected.

Hope this might help someone else in the future. or maybe even me in another place and time.