Reusing service proxies

Question

I have a set of webservices that I connect to using Silverlight Client. I use proxies generated by "Add service reference" or SLSVCUTIL.exe tool to connect to this service. So far, I have only used one single service. Now I want to use another service on the same server.

The problem is that, first service generated set of proxy classes for me, and second service will reuse the same set of classes (plus extra services/classes), e.g.

CustomerService.SaveCustomer(Customer customer);

OrderService.CheckCustomerLevel(Customer customer);

The problem is when I add reference to the second service, I can not reuse the same namespace for the second one (VS error), and when I use a different namespace, the generated classes, although are essentially the same, reside in different namespace, hence different and I end up with two Customer classes in two different namespaces.

Anyway around this? I just neeed to have two set of services, reusing the Customer class. I have already tried "reuse types in assembly / all assemblies" check mark when generating proxy classes, but it seems to have no effect.

any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I've run into this problem before, and the only solution I could come up with was to combine both web services into a single web service. This seems to be a limitation of the Add Service References/SLSvcUtil way of doing things.

If you're using Silverlight 4, you could conceivably try Silverlight/.NET assembly sharing to get around this (though I haven't tried it myself). In other words, compile the assembly that contains your data transfer objects in Silverlight, and then share it with the .NET/WCF back-end. That way, if you choose "Reuse types in assemblies", it would (in theory) actually re-use the existing Silverlight types for both service references.