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Using WSE 3.0 with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5

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While I'm sure many of you have "moved on" to Visual Studio 2010, there are a large number of us still using 2008. Recently, my shop needed to write some code for interfacing with a vendor's web services. No problem, right? Well… not quite. It was quite an undertaking to get a functional wrapper class for our vendor's web service shoehorned into Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 platform.

Enabling the WSE Settings GUI tool in VS2008

  1. First, download and install the WSE 3.0 for Microsoft .NET package
  2. Now, change each instance of 8.0 to 9.0 in the WSESettingsVS3.Addin file, which should be located here: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins\WSESettingsVS3.Addin
  3. In Visual Studio, open the Tools » Options dialog.
  4. Be sure that the Show all settings checkbox is checked.
  5. In the Options dialog, select Environment » Add-in/Macros Security and add the following path to the Add-in File Paths list: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins
  6. From the main Visual Studio interface, open the Tools » Add-in Manager dialog.
  7. Enable the WSE Settings Add-in.
  8. Restart Visual Studio.
  9. In your project, right-click the top-most node in the Solution Explorer window and select WSE Settings 3.0.
  10. Configure the WSE settings for your project—this will add the necessary references and Web.config directives.
  11. [OPTIONAL] If you will be using an authentication mechanism which relies on a UsernameToken, be sure to set up a UsernameToken Provider</i.>Security Tokens Managers section of the Security tab of the WSE settings.

Generating a WSE proxy class from a WSDL list

  1. Download and install the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK (x86), which is necessary for creating the WebClient-type proxy/wrapper class
  2. Use the WseWsdl3.exe tool with the /type:webClient switch to generate a WebClient-based proxy class for your web service: "c:\Program Files\Microsoft WSE\v3.0\Tools\WseWsdl3.exe" /nologo /type:webClient /out:c:\ProjectFolder\MyWebService.cs http://addres.of/my/webservice?wsdl
  3. Add the generated *.cs file to your project's App_Code directory.

Note: You may use WseWsdl3.exe without the .NET 2.0 SDK, but it will only be able to generate SoapClient-based proxy classes (which are difficult to integrate with a UsernameToken authentication header). In this case, you may omit the /type: flag altogether, as SoapClient is the default proxy class type.