Question

There is a web service written with WCF that I’m adding as reference. Proxy class generator works flawlessly when I add it to as service reference but it generates a slightly different class when I add it as web reference using service.svc?WSDL. Here’s are the differences:

//service reference
public partial class TestServicesClient : ... // correct class name
{
    public int TestMethod(string serviceID, int dealID) // correct method signature
    { ... }
}

//web reference
public partial class TestServices: ... //different class name
{
    public void TestMethod(string serviceID, int dealID, bool dealIDSpecified, out int TestMethodResult, out bool TestMethodResultSpecified) // different method signature
    { ... }
}

I tried using wsdl.exe for generating web reference class, didn’t help.

What is wrong here?

Answer 1

Nothing is wrong here. Service Reference is the “new” way to use a WCF Service, it removes overhead such as the “Specified”-parameter, “Result”-parameter and “Result Specificed”-parameter.

You can still use other properties/methods to check if a parameter is specified or if there is a result. But before WCF, it changed the method signature.

You use a Service Reference and a Web Reference a bit different and that’s just the way it is.

Here’s some additional reading:

• Difference between web reference and service reference?
• The Difference Between “Add Web Reference” and “Add Service Reference”

And to quote from a reply to “What is the difference between WCF service and web service”

WCF “web services” are part of a much
broader spectrum of remote
communication enabled through WCF. You
will get a much higher degree of
flexibility and portability doing
things in WCF than through traditional
ASMX because WCF is designed, from the
ground up, to summarize all of the
different distributed programming
infrastructures offered by MS. An
endpoint in WCF can be communicated
with just as easily over SOAP/XML as
it can over TCP/binary and to change
this medium is simply a configuration
file mod. In theory this reduces the
amount of new code needed when porting
or changing business needs, targets,
etc.

ASMX is older than WCF, and anything
ASMX can do so can WCF (and more).
Basically you can see WCF as trying to
logically group together all the
different ways of getting two apps to
communicate in the world of MS; ASMX
was just one of these many ways and so
is now grouped under the WCF umbrella
of capabilities.