Question

I am interested in impersonating well-known Web Services and Wcf Services for integration test purposes. To this end, I would like to capture service metadata, auto-generate service stubs, and host service stubs in a self-hosted environment.

Following this article here, I am able to obtain remote Wcf Service metadata and generate contracts. However, I am having some difficulty doing the same for remote Asmx Web Services.

I have a set of mickey-mouse solutions for vetting this out.

My Asmx solution contains a default “Hello World” web service, found below

[WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")]
[WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]
[System.ComponentModel.ToolboxItem(false)]
public class SimpleAsmxService : System.Web.Services.WebService
{
    [WebMethod]
    public string HelloWorld () { return "Hello World"; }
}

My Wcf solution contains a default “Hello World” service, also found below

[ServiceContract]
public interface ISimpleWcfService
{
    [OperationContract]
    string GetData(int value);

    [OperationContract]
    CompositeType GetDataUsingDataContract(CompositeType composite);
}

[DataContract]
public class CompositeType
{
    [DataMember]
    public bool BoolValue { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public string StringValue { get; set; }
}

public class SimpleWcfService : ISimpleWcfService
{
    public string GetData(int value)
    {
        return string.Format("You entered: {0}", value);
    }

    public CompositeType GetDataUsingDataContract(CompositeType composite)
    {
        if (composite.BoolValue)
        {
            composite.StringValue += "Suffix";
        }
        return composite;
    }
}

Finally, the little console-that-could looks like

class Program
{
    public const string UrlWcf = 
        "http://localhost:8731/Design_Time_Addresses/SimpleWcfService/mex";
    public const string UrlAsmx = 
        "http://localhost:1803/SimpleAsmxService.asmx?WSDL";

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        EndpointAddress mexAddress = new EndpointAddress (UrlWcf);
        MetadataExchangeClient mexClient = 
            new MetadataExchangeClient (mexAddress);
        mexClient.ResolveMetadataReferences = true;

        // NOTE: blows up if we use UrlAsmx
        MetadataSet metaSet = mexClient.GetMetadata ();

        WsdlImporter importer = new WsdlImporter (metaSet);
        Collection<ContractDescription> contracts = 
            importer.ImportAllContracts();
    }
}

It seems to me that I should be able to pull Wsdl from a well-known Asmx Web Service and generate contracts [and from contracts to code], but cannot seem to contort the preceding sample to do so. Any help would be much appreciated,

Thanks!

---

NOTE: the error generated when invoking MetadataSet metaSet = mexClient.GetMetadata(); above is a System.InvalidOperationException with message of

Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved : ‘http://localhost:1803/SimpleAsmxService.asmx?WSDL‘

With a System.InvalidOperationException inner exception with message of

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<Fault xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
    <Code>
        <Value>Sender</Value>
    </Code>
    <Reason>
        <Text xml:lang="en">
System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Unable to handle request without a valid action parameter. Please supply a valid soap action.
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.Soap12ServerProtocolHelper.RouteRequest()
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapServerProtocol.RouteRequest(SoapServerMessage message)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapServerProtocol.Initialize()
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.ServerProtocol.SetContext(Type type, HttpContext context, HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.ServerProtocolFactory.Create(Type type, HttpContext context, HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response, Boolean&amp; abortProcessing)
        </Text>
    </Reason>
</Fault>

Answer 1

The way to get it to work with an ASMX web service is to specify the MetadataExchangeClientMode

...
MetadataExchangeClient mexClient = 
    new MetadataExchangeClient (new Uri(), MetadataExchangeClientMode.HttpGet);
...

using MetadataExchangeClientMode.HttpGet for your ASMX services
and MetadataExchangeClientMode.MetadataExchange for your WCF services.