I have in the past coded up Windows Form or Console apps in Visual Studio (2005 and earlier), and the IDE has facilitated linking up with a web service.  Now I am building a console application that needs to consume a web service, but when I right-click on the project (or References), I do not see a "Add Web Reference" context menu item (for WinForm or Console app).  There IS one if I right-click on a Web Application project, but this doesn't help me, as the application I am building MUST be a console app.  This was not the behavior in VS2005, or earlier!  What's up with that?  The MSDN page that describes the process for .NET 3.5 does not make a distinction; i.e. does not acknowledge a difference.

I am not making this up, and it is not an optical illusion.  Here's are the two context menus, side by side:

So now I am wondering how I am supposed to hook up a web service to a Console application. I imagine that this is still possible at a lower level (i.e. it can be hand-coded), but I am unsure how to proceed. I have posted the question on StackOverflow.

And StackOverflow Comes Through With an Answer!

With VS2008 MS is focused on WCF-Services. You can select a Webservice Reference by clicking "Add Service Reference..." and on the following dialog clicking the "Advanced..." button. In the following dialog you can choose to add a Web Service Reference.

And just as Filburt said, so it was. I love StackOverflow!

But my observation is: Leave it to Microsoft to hide something that used to exist in a highly visible location, and without comment in the documentation, shove it into an obscure location 2 levels deeper in the IDE! I can imagine some design wanker saying to himself, "Well, nobody cares about this anymore, so we'll just hide it where the sun doesn't shine." Did someone take a survey to decide this? He probably just asked his liberal-arts degreed girlfriend, and when she said "Huh?" he ticked the box marked "Asked the users?"

1/12/2010 7:43:35 PM UTC      Comments [0]

For you non-programmers out there here's a fair warning, this is probably going to be of little interest to you.

The rest of you, if you haven't heard of Stack Overflow yet, this is one Rockin' site for developers.  Just have a quick look:

Stack Overflow

It is a marvelous place to ask programming-related questions, mainly because there are people there who will answer them!  I've done some comparisions between Stack Overflow and the MSDN Forums, and my experience is that questions that garner 2 or 3 views in a week or two on MSDN (and maybe no answers) will get several views in an hour and a first response within minutes.  Awesome.  Maybe they've all gone over to Stack Overflow, I don't know, but this is one heckuva "social networking" site for nerds, let me tell you.  Nerds want to talk about tech, and programmer nerds want to talk about programming, and even better, show off their smarts.  This is the place!

5/7/2009 3:31:25 PM UTC      Comments [1]