Visual-studio – use Visual Studio service references over svcutil

service-referencevisual studiowcf

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?

Best Answer

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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