Question

We have a Visual Studio solution that comprises multiple production and test projects. The solution uses several web services.

The way things are organized at the moment, each project that needs access to a web service has a “Service Reference” for that web service added to it. This means that there are multiple (usually only two) references to every web service: one in the production code, one in the test code.

However, we are finding a problem: when the other web-services get updated, we often forget to update ALL the service references to them (usually in the test projects that use them).

Someone suggested that we add a new project to the solution that contains ALL the service references and that NO OTHER project should have a service reference included.

Are there any “gotchas” with this proposed approach?

Is it a good idea? And why (not)?

Answer 1

We use the same approach as well, however there’s a very inconvenient gotcha – you can’t have multiple service-references from the same application.
So we ended up having to create the service-references manually using the svcutil, but other than that, we’re pretty happy with the change.