Why should I use Visual Studio service references over svcutil?

visual-studio wcf service-reference
Brandon Linton picture Brandon Linton · Sep 19, 2011 · Viewed 11.8k times · Source

So it seems like I have a couple of major options when getting WCF service proxy code into a project in Visual Studio:

  1. Use Visual Studio's built-in tooling for Service References

  2. Use a simple svcutil command, something like svcutil http://[my endpoint] /namespace:[my namespace] /noconfig (since I use some fairly standard bindings across projects), and drag the resulting file into my project (or upgrade in place).

To be clear, option 2 feels like the best one, albiet with no built-in tooling for updating. But the Service Reference dialog generates like a zillion files. Is there any obscure benefit to VS Service References that I'm missing?

Answer

Davide Piras picture Davide Piras · Sep 19, 2011

Same reason why you build a .net project with VS and not calling the compiler by hand from command line. The I of IDE stands for Integrated, it does things for you so you do not need to do those things manually from many separated places and procedures.

There is usually a way to do many of those things by hand or with a text editor and command prompt but lets be productive :-)

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