Lifeng's Blog

Not all code generation options of service references are exposed through its UI. To prevent users to be confused by some advanced options, the configuration dialog is designed to only expose options which are most likely to be used. We can only access...

Two old designers in VS 2005 have been removed from Orcas product. There are several reasons why they are removed: 1, there will be a brand new schema designer built into VS. However, because of schedule issues, it is not in Orcas, but will be released...

The Service Reference is new feature added into VS Orcas, so we don't have to use svcutil when using VS IDE. Here is the side by side comparsion table between svcutil and the service reference in Orcas: Svcutil command line VS...

It is a problem asked by some customers. They were using Begin/End invocation pattern to call web service asynchronously. Those async methods were generated in web proxies in Visual Studio 7.x, and when they are using wsdl.exe tool, but were gone when...

The WCF tool in the Visual Studio exposes several layers of extensibility APIs. Those were built into the product to make a third party could extend the feature to make it easy to use in their special environment, or make the feature work in a third party...

Passing DataTable (without embeded into a dataset) across web services is supported in .Net 2.0 framework. However we found a bug in this area, which might affect using this feature with strong typed dataTable. For example, when a web service function...

In VS 9, the "Add Web Reference" menu command was "replaced" by "Add Service Reference" command in all client projects (VB/C#) targeting 3.x platform. Although "service reference" works for most existing web servers, the proxy generated from "Service...

After we add a WCF service reference into a Visual Studio project, a .svcmap file will be added to the project, and it contains most information of the service reference. Actually, it is the only essential file of the reference. In most case, we can remove...

Type sharing is very useful when we want to pass same data between two services. Without type sharing, we will get seperated types in the proxy for every service we consume. That means a lot of code to convert data in one type to another before and after...

The ContextSwitchDeadlock MDA is a very annoying debugger message. The message is reported by a background thread, which wakes up once a while and if it finds a remote call doesn't pass in 60 seconds, it raises the error. But the problem is that the error...

The new service reference is persisted in a similar way how the old web reference is persisted in a visual studio project. All files including metadata file downloaded from the server will be persisted into a single folder, which defines the CLR namespace...

The Visual Studio Orcas beta1 supports generating and using WCF client in the ASP.Net web site projects. From the platform point of view, ASP.Net wants to enable an user to build a web site without any Visual Studio tools. The feature to generate WCF...

When you create a project targetting .Net framework 3.x in Orcas Beta 1, the "Add Web Reference..." menu is replaced by "Add Service Reference..." menu. "Add Service Reference..." will create a WCF (Windows Communication Framework) client to a web service...

Normally, it is not possible to use XmlSerializer with internal classes. However, it is possible to work around this issue, when the internal classes are written in C#. To do that, we need create a special build configuration, and '#if' block in the...

If you create managed application in Visual Studio 2005, you will notice that a resource class is generated when you add resources to the resx file. The class makes getting resource values much easier. But some are troubled because the class is generated...

The question has been asked on the Visual Studio Forums several times. I guess it might be worth to post some information here. The content of the exception assistant are saved in xml files under “Visual studio InstallDir\ExceptionAssistantContent...

It will only happen when we debug a managed application with the new Visual Studio 2005. When the application throws an exception, the debugger may tell us that the exception is unhandled, and stops there. When we try to hit F5 to resume the application...

If you are using new VB My.Forms feature, and also write a multithread application, you might notice that My.Forms.MyForm1 actually returns different instance in different thread. So if your background thread tries to using this to update something on...