Question

I’ve built a simple client-server application. When I make changes to the server, I would delete the Service Reference and recreate it to reflect the changes I made to the server application.

Must I have to recreate it each time I make a change to the server application, or is there any way for the service reference to be updated automatically?

Thanks

Answer 1

The basic answer is probably: yes.

The beauty of WCF and distributed applications is that the client and server can evolve separately. Updating the client to take advantage of a newer version of the service should be a conscious choice.

Of course, during development this may be a pain. There are several ways to alleviate this problem, here are a few I could think of:

• Use Visual Studio to manage your service reference. If you’ve updated the service, just right click and choose “Update Service Reference”, this shouldn’t take too much effort.
• Use a test-driven approach to create your service. This allows you to focus on getting the business logic in your service done without the need for clients accessing it. Once you have “green lights” you create the client. This approach minimizes the number of times you’d need to update a client.
• Automate the use of svcutil to create new client side code whenever you need / want it.

There’s surely more (and probably even better) approaches, but these may help you already.