Last week, I got an e-mail from a customer using our web services. They were wondering some operations were not working properly when no input parameters were given. This raised an eyebrow at first, as my documentation clearly stated that this information was mandatory.

It would soon become clear, that the developer in question did not read said documentation at all, but was in fact flying blind on the WSDL. Indeed, the input message schema said everything was optional; this is default behavior for WCF. In this article, I'll work on fixing this minor caveat in the interest of interoperability.

When using WCF to consume a web service from your .NET application, you have a couple of different options:

• Using a contract-only assembly reference, generating a proxy at runtime
• Generate a proxy by running svcutil.exe
• Adding a service reference to your project from Visual Studio

This post is focused on the last of these three options. When adding a service reference, Visual Studio presents you with a dialog box which allows you some level of control over the proxy being generated. One of these options allows you to choose the namespace for the generated classes.

Unfortunately, there is a small but annoying limitation on your ability to choose any namespace you like; Visual Studio will always prefix whatever namespace you enter with the current project's default namespace.

I have spent a considerable amount of time on development in a service-oriented architecture. On the Microsoft platform, the technology of choice is WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Generally, it is a great technology, but it does have its nuisances. One of them is the way certain error conditions are handled when consuming web services.

A few years ago I wouldn't have imagined I would start a blog, but things change. Every now and then I have the urge to write about something that I consider interesting, but I have no place to put it. Now I do.

I plan to be focusing mostly on .NET software development. I also expect posts to be infrequent, but who knows, maybe I'll become inspired.

About me

Software development has been one of my major interests from the moment I had (infrequent) access to a computer, at about the age of 10. Over the years, I have dabbled in quite a number of programming languages, but nowadays I do most of my development using Microsoft .NET.

On the internet, I mostly go by the nickname Thorarin. On occasion, I can be found on Stack Overflow, a great programming Q&A website. In the unlikely event that you haven't heard about it, check it out.

In everyday life, I work as a software engineer for the technology research department of a company in the health IT industry. Now that has been said: opinions expressed here should be considered strictly my own.