Question

I have a Service Reference (not a web reference) in VS2008 to a web service that I did not write. The reference works, but only asynchronous versions of each method are available for me to use.

In the ‘Configure Service Reference’ dialog, the ‘Generate asynchronous operations’ is checked and grayed out. First of all, I thought checking this box generated async methods in addition to, not instead of, blocking methods. Second, I’ve never seen it grayed out before.

I have experience writing both sides of both WCF and ASMX-era web services and have never seen this before. What could be causing this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I’d be willing to wager ten up-votes that it’s because you’re doing this in Silverlight. Unfortunately I don’t have the tools installed so I can’t test this theory, but I do know that service calls from Silverlight can only be asynchronous. Perhaps you are using a Silverlight project template and are creating the service reference there? Visual Studio might be smart enough to know not to generate blocking methods in such a situation.

For reference:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197937(VS.95).aspx