Archive for August 24th, 2008

Add Web Reference instead of Service Reference in Visual Studio 2008

I’m just in the middle turning a 2-tier app into a 3-tier app (it was planned all along, so it’s been quite easy so gar). Anyway I added the service reference to my client project and wanted to reuse shared assemblies (which was a pain in the a** in ASP.net 2.0 Webservice – let me just say I had my set of batch scripts altering the generated proxy code). But in Windows Communication Foundation it’s really easy. When you add a reference just click on the ‘Advanced’ button and choose the options.

But that’s not actually what I wanted to blog about. Even with Visual Studio 2008 and .net 3.5 (3.0) I prefer to use old style Webservices sometimes but at the same time of course I don’t want to miss out on Linq etc. Until now I kept changing the target plattform to .net 2.0 to get my ‘Add Web Reference’ context menu item and then changing it back to .net 3.5. It works, but I kept grumbling why on earth they removed the option in VS08, well it turns out they didn’t remove it, the just moved it.

In the advanced dialog at the bottom you can add a web reference as before. (But it is still counter intuitive, why is adding an old style reference a suboption after picking a service reference? I would have preferred my context menu item.)

‘MSDTC unavailable for SQL Express Transactions’ or ‘Who took my MSDTC settings on Vista?’

Greeted this morning by the following error after starting my unit tests “MSDTC on server ‘LONDON\SQLEXPRESS’ is unavailable.”. Just moved development to a new Vista machine. Ok, that’s usually solved quickly by activating Network DTC Access (side note: System.Transactions promotes to MSDTC if it needs too).

On Win2003 and XP you opened up the Component Services, right-clicked Properties on the ‘My Computer’ node under Computer Services > Computers and opened the ‘MSDTC’ tab in the dialog. There you changed the security settings. On Vista (and Win2008 where we had similar troubles a week or so ago, and I had forgotten to ask exactly where and how our sysadmin fixed it) you have to run ‘dcomcnfg’ from the run prompt and if you take the above described path it looks like this:

Lot’s of blank space and no ‘Security Settings’. Ok, in Vista onward they moved the security settings to a new node. Expand the tree to see the ‘Local DTC’ node.

Properties on that look like this:

There you can switch to the Security tab and activate Network DTC access. Voila you’re done…


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