Sometimes adding a WCF Service Reference generates an empty reference.cs

Sometimes adding a WCF Service Reference generates an empty reference.cs and I cannot reference the service anywhere in the project.

Has anyone encountered this?

Solution 1:

Generally I find that it's a code-gen issue and most of the time it's because I've got a type name conflict it couldn't resolve.

If you right-click on your service reference and click configure and uncheck "Reuse Types in Referenced Assemblies" it'll likely resolve the issue.

If you were using some aspect of this feature, you might need to make sure your names are cleaned up.

Solution 2:

As the accepted answer points out, a type reference issue when reusing types is probably the culprit. I found when you cannot easily determine the issue then using svcutil.exe command line will help you reveal the underlying problem (as John Saunders points out).

As an enhancement here is a quick example of using svcutil.

svcutil /t:code https://secure.myserver.com/services/MyService.svc /d:test /r:"C:\MyCode\MyAssembly\bin\debug\MyAssembly.dll"

Where:

• /t:code generates the code from given url
• /d: to specify the directory for the output
• /r: to specify a reference assembly

Full svcutil command line reference here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347733.aspx

Once you run svcutil, you should see the exception being thrown by the import. You may receive this type of message about one of your types: "referenced type cannot be used since it does not match imported DataContract".

This could simply be as specified in that there is a difference in one of the types in the referenced assembly from what was generated in the DataContract for the service. In my case, the service I was importing had newer, updated types from what I had in the shared assembly. This was not readily apparent because the type mentioned in the exception appeared to be the same. What was different was one of the nested complex types used by the type.

There are other more complex scenarios that may trigger this type of exception and resulting blank reference.cs. Here is one example.

If you are experiencing this issue and you are not using generic types in your data contracts nor are you using IsReference = true, then I recommend verifying for certain that your shared types are exactly the same on your client and server. Otherwise, you will likely run into this issue.