Free Tools for Better WCF Development -- Visual Studio Magazine

Three Free Tools for WCF Development

By Peter Vogel
09/21/2010

For the developer working with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Visual Studio provides almost all the tools that you need. Where Visual Studio doesn't have what you want, however, CodePlex often does. Some of the free tools on CodePlex include:

wscf.blue:This Visual Studio add-in is the latest version of thinktecture's "contract first" development tool. In contract first development you begin by defining your service's operations and, from that specification, generate a code skeleton. http://wscfblue.codeplex.com/

WCFProxyGenerator: Another Visual Studio add-in, this tool extends the generation of the client-side to provide additional error handling, particularly around managing your channels. http://wcfproxygenerator.codeplex.com/

WCFMock: Speaking of testing, if you want to build your WCF service using a Test Driven Development (TDD) methodology you'll need some way to test your interactions with the WebOperationContext and OperationContext helper classes (you're probably using them when getting or setting HTTP status codes, for instance). WCFMock provides a way to mock those classes for testing. http://wcfmock.codeplex.com/

Not all WCF tools are free, however. If you're looking for something more capable than the WCF Test Client, you might want to check out WCFStorm. http://www.wcfstorm.com

About the Author

Peter Vogel is a system architect and principal in PH&V Information Services. PH&V provides full-stack consulting from UX design through object modeling to database design. Peter tweets about his VSM columns with the hashtag #vogelarticles. His blog posts on user experience design can be found at http://blog.learningtree.com/tag/ui/.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.