I want to use Fitnesse to do a subsytem testing of a WCF service.
Now to test a WCF service should I add the 'WebReference', and to add the webreference I require to host the service somewhere?
I believe Fitnesse as a new consumer to the service and it should add the WebReference.
For WCF, you should use "Add Service Reference" in Visual Studio, or svcutil.exe on the command line.
You can either add the reference from a running service (and then it needs to be hosted somewhere, yes), or you can extract the metadata (the WSDL that describes the service operations and the XSD that describe the message structures; again, using svcutil.exe) to files and create your client side proxy from those files.
If you only want to test the actual service implementation (without the WCF plumbing in between), you could of course also just add a normal reference to the assembly where your service implementation lives (which you hopefully isolated into a class library!), instantiate the service class, and call the methods on it. Depends on what you really want to test here...
Marc
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I have a WCF Service expose for me in my Test environment that I need to consume. In order to test my client code in my local environment I wish to create a WCF service that behave like this service. My question is, is it possible to create that kind of simulator (Local WCF Service) from all the code that I have with the same binding, behavior etc. like the service that expose to me in my Test env? (I have: WSDL's files + XSD's, *.cs + output.config that generated by SvcUtil tool)
do you mean something like SOAP UI?
http://www.soapui.org/
http://www.soapui.org/Functional-Testing/functional-testing.html
The easiest for you would probably be to make a copy of your WCF service code, and remove all implementation and replace it with your logic. In case you didn't had access to the service code I would say use svcutil.exe to generate the data contract classes and then manually build a WCF server that uses these contracts and has the right binding.
I am creating a WCF service. At first I had one WCF service library project and one console project which was referencing the this library. And it worked fine when I used "add service reference" in my client project, as long as the service library had a valid App.Config file.
However, now I want to combine the service library and the console host into one console project. After all, the previous console project was pretty simple. But here comes the problem: when I choose "add service reference" and give the endpoint I defined in the App.config file of the new console project, it can't find any service reference. I take it because the service will not be hostedd by wcfsvchost.exe when the add service reference function was on(and I think it makes sense). But I can't think of a way to make it work. So how am I supposed to add a service reference, if my service is one single console-hosted project?
The easiest way for you is to run WCF service, generate a service reference and then combine it into single application. All you will need to do is just change address in your app.config. But be careful with this, as you should change address for client part and not server part of app.config.
This approach, however, will be difficult to maintain in future, when you will decide to change your service data contract and regenerate service reference. You might want to consider the following: wrap service reference into assembly and use assembly instead. This way you will be able to regenerate you service reference whenever needed.
Allow me to explain a little better.
I have a VS2010 Solution, split into 2 projects: a WCF Web Service, and a Class Library that uses the Web Service.
The WCF Web Service is a simple logging service; namespace "LogService", service "LogService", contract "ILogService".
When you use the "Add Service Reference" utility that comes with VS2010 to add a reference to the WCF, into the consuming Class Library project, you will see that the tool correctly adds a reference to a Web Service that can be called through "LogService.LogServiceClient". No problem here.
Now, I have another Solution; this is also split into 2 projects: another WCF Web Service, and a Web Application that uses this new Web Service.
This particular Web Service provides operations performed on a database; namespace "BLService", service "BLService", contract "IBLService".
Using that very same "Add Service Reference" utility in this project, however, adds a reference whose client name is actually "BLService.IBLServiceClient". Please notice there is a "I" prepended to the service client class name. The utility seems to have decided it should use the contract's name, instead of the service's name, to create the service client class.
I don't understand why does the tool behave differently on both Solutions. I've tried checking everything I could from both, and I can't find no significative differences (to my knowledge, at least).
Do you people know why does this happen? What things should I check, and correct, in my Web project (or anywhere else in the solution) so this odd behavior does not happen anymore?
I have a WCF deployed on IIS. Now by adding web reference of it i am using it on my app.
So I have two questions:
Is it the best method of consuming WCF.
If the answer of first question is yes then what is the role of svcutil.exc, I mean what is the use of creating wcf proxy class. and if the answer is "No" then why?
It is the easiest solution if you develop with visual studio and have access the remote WCF service.
If you are developing using another IDE, you might want to use SvcUtil to generate your proxies.
If you prefer to have a simple CS file containing the generated client, you might also choose to generate it using SvcUtil.
You may also completely ignore SvcUtil and the Service Reference wizard and use the ChannelFactory class to generate proxies dynamically.
You should use "Add Service Reference" in Visual Studio (not Add Web Reference) for WCF.
It is the easiest way - since you can do it right in Visual Studio. What it does under the covers is basically call svcutil.exe (or you can do that manually, from the command line yourself), and create a service proxy class for use on the client side.
The use of svcutil.exe is many fold - you can create a client proxy class from a running service (or from an existing WSDL/XSD file), you can verify services, you can export metadata from a service for clients to consume, and a great many more options. It's the "Swiss Army Knife" of WCF tools.
WCF uses a concept that all calls to your service must go through a client proxy - this is the place where the entire WCF runtime lives, and where all the WCF extensibility points are located. This proxy converts your call to a method on the client into a serialized message that gets sent across the network to the server for processing, and it also handles "unpacking" the response from the call back into classes and objects on your client side for your use.
Adding a service reference is the quickest and easiest way but not always the best way. If you want performance then using ChannelFactory<T> is the way to go. You should know different ways to create a client side proxy and customisations that you can do.
An excellent resource is WcfGuidanceForWpf. Don't let the WPF in it scare you as it is really an excellent guidance for general WCF as well.
Is it possible to add a service reference in visual studio, which generates the local proxy class to call the WCF service when using the netTcpBinding?
As I understood it, the service reference method requires a WSDL to be exposed by the service, which is only supported by the http bindings no?
Perhaps, could I add the service reference locally in development, but then switch the configuration to use nettcp at runtime in production?
The reason I am asking is because I am hosting in a windows service (server 2003, so no WAS, and can't use IIS). And we are unable to change the permissions to do the HTTP namespace reservation ... so we can't use the HTTP bindings. NetTcp works, but in this specific case the object graph we're passing back and forth involves objects generated in the service by an EDMX model ... so we can't share it in a contract assembly.
Thanks in advance!
Simply add a binding using mexTcpBinding.
Is it possible to add a service reference in visual studio,
which generates the local proxy class to call the
WCF service when using the netTcpBinding?
Yes, most definitely!
As I understood it, the service reference method requires a WSDL
to be exposed by the service, which is only supported by the http bindings no?
No, definitely not - WCF metadata (either its own specific format, or exposed as WSDL / XSD files) is definitely available for all SOAP-based calls - regardless of their transport.
Can you show us what you have, in terms of server-side config? Most likely, you're just missing a little config setting or something - if we see what you have, we might be able to pinpoint that and help you more!
All bindings are exposed though WSDL. If you add the NETTCP bindings svcutil will atuo generate the client correctly. I haven't used it in the ADD reference in VS as i have always preferred to generate the class with svcutil.