Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 – WCF test client error
I attended the Microsoft Partner Event "OnRamp240 Microsoft(r) Visual Studio(r) 2008" this morning at the local Microsoft office in Bloomington. Local evangelist Mike Benkovich presented the material.
One of the cool new VS.NET 2008 features Mike demoed is the automatic WCF Test Client. Normally when you write a WCF service you need to implement a client and a host for it, which in .NET 3.0 lacks a bit of tooling (for productivity reasons). In .NET 3.5 you create your WCF service, and then run it in the WCF Test Client. It spins up a simple host (think: like VS.NET 2005 does for a Visual Studio Web Server) and brings up a client interface where you can enter values in a treeview/listview like control and invoke the WCF service method. ASMX could handle this for simple parameters only (e.g. string, int, etc…) but could not handle complex data contracts (messages). This tool handles complex data contracts!!!!!! Granted, I have not given it any real tough contracts yet, but plan to in the upcoming weeks. I will report the findings back here of course.
Post event, I fired up my Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Suite VPC and tried using the WCF Test Client. Alas, a nasty exception came up:
Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'svcutil, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A)
File name: 'svcutil, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' ---> System.Security.SecurityException: Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A)
The Zone of the assembly that failed was:
MyComputer
Thanks to Google and the Readme file (of course I did not read that first, insert embarrassed smiley face here) for the workaround.
From: http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/d/1/dd18043a-fe86-4f57-ac22-791b30e6f04b/VSReadme.htm
2.3.7.8 Running some WCF-based project templates results in a crash of svcutil.exe crashing due to a signing issue
Running some WCF-based project templates starts the service in WCF Service Host and opens a test form to debug operations on the service. Because of a signing problem, this results in a crash of svcutil.exe and the test form does not work.
To resolve this issue:
Disable strong name signing for svcutil.exe by opening a Visual Studio Command Prompt. At the command prompt run: sn -Vr "<program files>\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\SvcUtil.exe" (replace <program files> with your program files path - ex: c:\Program Files)
More to come! Bring on VS.NET 2008!
jk
p.s. another blog post from Word 2007 J