Visual Studio web reference - $metadata vs. ?wsdl

Question

This is a legacy project that I have not touched in a while. Now the web reference is causing me trouble.

I connect to a SOAP service from a Windows Mobile 6 client. When the service host runs locally on my development box, I can point the web reference to it and it will discover the WSDL, i.e. it will attempt to pull the service description by appending ?wsdl to the endpoint URL. I can build the app and connect to the service from the emulator.

I can for some reason not point Visual Studio to the current production environment for discovery. There it appends /$metadata to the URL instead of ?wsdl. The wsdl is there and I can view it in a browser, though. The mobile app is live and has been connecting to the service for years.

The HTML document does not contain Web service discovery information.
There was an error downloading 'https://mysite/myservice.asmx/$metadata'.
The request failed with the error message:
--
<html>
   <head>
       <title>Request format is unrecognized for

I know that it is not possible to discover a web service on a non-standard port from Visual Studio. Does it not work with SSL, either? How does Visual Studio decide to use either method for discovery?Or do you have any other thoughts?

RuedigerKausK RuedigerKausK · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-13T22:39:52

I still have no clue what's going wrong with your service but I can discover webservices on non standard ports adding the port to the url (and the ?wsdl as well) from within WS

http://10.177.55.13:10321/MyServices/?wsdl

If this doesn't help open the wsdl in your browser. Copy the xml code, paste it into your editor and save it as .wsdl file. In VS use the filename as url for the service.

HTH Ruediger

Visual Studio web reference - $metadata vs. ?wsdl

1 Answers