WCF Services

Connecting to WCF Services Services using Visual Studio or the SVCUtil CLI

Updated: 03 September 2023

In order to consume a WCF Service from a .NET client you can make use of the Connected Services section in Visual Studio, or using the svcutil tool in the dotnet cli

SVCUtil

You first need to install the svcutil with:

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dotnet tool install --global dotnet-svcutil

To create a new service reference you can run the following command with your service endpoint

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dotnet-svcutil http://myservice/service.svc

Which will create a ServiceReference.cs file which contains your service references

Visual Studio

From the Connected Services item under the relevant project in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, double click on Connected Services and then Microsoft WCF Web Service Reference Provider and input your URL and click Go

Thereafter the available services will be listed and you can set the service namespace and click Finish

Usage

In your .cs file that you want to use the service do the following:

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using ServiceReference;

In order to use the service you need to create an instance of the Service and then just call the required operation

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var client = new ServiceClient(); // this will be the name of the client that you want to use
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var response = await client.ClientMethod(); // the method you want to invoke