I have developed a WCF service that has been working fine for a few weeks now. I publish this service to IIS directly from the development server. I have a dev test app that includes this WCF service as a Service Reference in its own project.
My WCF class library also references another project within the Visual Studio solution, and many classes are in the referenced project that are used by the service and calling applications.
Today, after publishing some changes to the service (I did not make ANY changes to the referenced project or its classes), three of about 20 of the classes in the referenced project are no longer in the service reference of my test app. I cannot use them in code any longer, and they are no longer in the Reference.cs. I double checked, the classes in question are still decorated with [DataContract] and the properties are all still decorated with [DataMember] in the service solution.
Everything is building in Visual Studio OK.. I have rebuilt and republished everything, the missing classes are set to compile, I have tried IIS resets, completely deleted the IIS site and did a clean republish, no avail. I have tried deleting the service reference on the test app and getting a clean proxy every time as well. Nothing is working.
I then tried making a dummy class in the referenced project and built it in. Republished the service again, and even this dummy class does not appear in the Reference.cs. I am at a complete loss as to why these classes are not included in the .dll for the referenced project after it is published as it is evident that everything is building OK in Visual Studio.
Wanted to come back and post what was causing my problem:
I had made changes and none of my service methods used the 3 “missing” classes as a return type or parameter anymore. I simply had to un-comment the methods that used those classes to make them usable again. Makes sense now but I was convinced something else was wrong.