Customizing Visual Studio generated service reference namespaces

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.

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