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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T14:35:30+00:00

Project Structure I have a silverlight project SLProj, that references a silverlight class library

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Project Structure

I have a silverlight project SLProj, that references a silverlight class library project called ServiceClients. ServiceClients has two wcf service references, Svc1.svc and Svc2.svc. Both Svc1.svc and Svc2.svc are in two different WCF projects which use the same set of DataContracts which are again in a different class library project called MyDataContracts.dll.

Problem description

Now in my ServiceClients project I get an ambiguous reference issue when I need to use a datacontract class which is present in both the service references. If this were a winforms or webforms project, I could reference the MyDataContracts.dll and reuse the common types. But since, this MyDataContracts.dll was built using a non silverlight class library, it can’t be referenced in the silverlight project

Workaround…

I am not sure if this below is the best method to go about taking care of this issue. Can anybody let me know if there is a cleaner way to solve this problem, or is this the best way we have so far?

  • create a single service reference.
  • click the ‘show all files’ button in the solution explorer
  • drill into the service reference and find Reference.svcmap and open it
  • find the MetadataSources section

  • add a second line to include the address to your second service. for example:

    MetadataSource Address="http://address1.svc" Protocol="http" SourceId="1" 
MetadataSource Address="http://address2.svc" Protocol="http" SourceId="2"

  • save, close, and update service reference.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your workaround is actually quite OK. We’ve used it in several projects like this with 3 service references. It is actually a workaround for the IDE which for some reason only allows to select one service to create a service reference at a time.

    Another thing you could try-out is to multi-target your shared contract to .NET and Silverlight, using the same codebase. Details on how to do such thing is described in http://10rem.net/blog/2009/07/13/sharing-entities-between-wcf-and-silverlight. Might be more work but feel less hacky.

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