Question

Using Visual Studio 2010 professional I’m creating a WCF web service and a MVC 3 web site that will consume that web service.

How would I reasonably go around doing that. Should I keep them as seperate projects in the same solution? Can I skip referencing and running the service locally while developing, just use it like a library?

Answer 1

We are doing this on a daily basis like this:

• Create single solution
• Add a class library project and create your web service interface
• Add a WCF service library project and create a service implementation for your interface (ref your service interface project)
• Add a MVC3 web application project and reference your service interface project here also
• In your MVC3 web application project add either a direct reference to the service implementation (during development, use it like a library) or add a service reference to your WCF service library (for running as a seperate webserver in production).

This gives a fast development cycle, and if you stick to the interface operations, also the possibility to deploy the WCF service as a separate entity when you need to go into production, or scale out.