Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

CHAPTER 7 ■ .NET 3.0: WINDOWS COMMUNICATION FOUNDATION 167
Figure 7-5. Service harness with metadata enabled
If you’ve built ASMX web services, you’ll probably be familiar with the ability to test
them with a simple form that is generated for you by the application. Unfortunately, your
WCF service doesn’t offer the same functionality, so you have to use the svcutil.exe tool
to generate a client.
This screen demonstrates how you can do this. The svcutil.exe tool creates a proxy
class that can be used to talk to the service, as well as the desired configuration information
that enables the WCF pipelines to communicate with it. So, if you had for example
enabled security or transactability on your service, the client will be configured to use the
same features automatically.
This is best demonstrated by example, so in the next section, you’ll look at how to use
these attributes to build a “real-life” service. This will extend the examples in the previous
chapters using the address data from the AdventureWorks database.