Deploying a WCF service on a remote pc - wcf

Question

I have a WCF web service, which I have hosted in IIS on my PC. This I have added as Service Reference in a Visual Studio Project and I am able to invoke it successfully in a web service in this VS Project.
Now I am trying to deploy this web services on a remote PC, which doesn't have Visual Studio installed. For this purpose I copied the .svc and web.config files and bin folder of this web services to a folder on the remote PC. Then I hosted the services on IIS pointing to the respective folder. Now when I browse the web service using the .svc link I am able to access the web service from my PC. I added this web service as a service reference in my Visual Studio project and everything looks OK, I am able to see the separate methods and their parameters in the Object browser. The problem appears when I try to invoke methods from this web services.
I am able to invoke one method and then when I invoke the second one I get the following error (The absolutely same web service and all its methods work perfectly if hosted in IIS on my PC.):
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Here is a part of the method where I invoke the web service (the web service name is TFSWS):
public void ImportRequirements(string username, string password)
{
TFSWS.TFSWSClient obj = new TFSWS.TFSWSClient();
string projects = obj.GetTFSProjects(username, password, TFS_URI);
string list = obj.GetAllWorkItems(ProjectName2, username, password, TFS_URI, WItypes);
Here is the code of the first method which I am able to invoke successfully from TFSWS:
public string GetTFSProjects(string userName, string password, string Uri)
{
StringWriter MyStringWriter = new StringWriter();
NetworkCredential cred = new NetworkCredential(userName, password);
TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(Uri), cred);
_tfs.Authenticate();
ICommonStructureService tfsProjectService = (ICommonStructureService)_tfs.GetService(typeof(ICommonStructureService));
ProjectInfo[] projects = tfsProjectService.ListAllProjects();
string[] proj = new string[projects.Length];
for (int i = 0; i < projects.Length; i++)
{
proj[i] = projects[i].ToString();
}
DataTable ProjectsDT = GetDataTableFromArray(proj);
...
}
Here is the code of the second method that I invoke from TFSWS and that throws the error message (When I debug I can see that all parameters are assigned correctly):
public string GetAllWorkItems(string projectName, string username, string password, string URI, string[] WItypes)
{
StringWriter MyStringWriter = new StringWriter();
NetworkCredential cred = new NetworkCredential(username, password);
TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(URI), cred);
_tfs.Authenticate();
WorkItemStore _witStore =(WorkItemStore)_tfs.GetService(typeof(WorkItemStore));
DataTable myData = new DataTable();
string project = projectName;
string[] m_columns;
Hashtable context = new Hashtable();
Project proj = _witStore.Projects[project];
}
string myQuery = "SELECT [System.Id], [System.Title], [System.WorkItemType], [System.State] FROM WorkItems WHERE ...";
WorkItemCollection result = _witStore.Query(myQuery, context);
DisplayFieldList fieldList = result.Query.DisplayFieldList;
...
}

Answer 1

You can debug remotely to figure out the issue the code is experiencing on the target machine, without installing all of Visual Studio on it. You just need to deploy debug instead of release mode assemblies, and have the remote debugger service running on it.
Remote Debugging Setup