Question

I created WCF service (last year) that is consumed by Silverlight application and it doesn’t have metadata (doesn’t have IMetadataExchange endpoint).

Now I need WCF service to be consumed by windows console application and I can’t add reference to service. I click ‘Add Service’ discover solution’s services, selected ‘required’ service and clicked ‘Ok’ button.

Instead of service reference created I got the following error:

The HTML document does not contain Web
service discovery information.
Metadata contains a reference that
cannot be resolved:
‘http://localhost/EnrollmentService.svc’.
There was no endpoint listening at
http://localhost/EnrollmentService.svc
that could accept the message. This is
often caused by an incorrect address
or SOAP action. See InnerException, if
present, for more details. The remote
server returned an error: (404) Not
Found. If the service is defined in
the current solution, try building the
solution and adding the service
reference again.

Should I work on adding metadata support for WCF service or it should be another solution?

Please advice.

Answer 1

You can use a WCF Service without exposing metadata.

Metadata is used to generate a proxy by Visual Studio or any other tool. So, in case you don’t expose metadata, you are going to have to create/write these proxy classes yourself.

As long as you use correct service address and right data contracts, you are good to go.

Accessing WCF service without creating Proxy