Calling WCF Service using LINQPad

05 December 2012 jscott
First, if you are a .NET developer and you are not using LINQPad yet go and check it out at www.linqpad.net. They offer a free version that is the same as the paid version but without intellisense and the pricing to upgrade to the full version is well worth the productivity gain you get.

Ok, with that out of the way let me get to the issue I came across and how I solved it.

Issue:

Created an assembly project in order to create a proxy to a web services using .NET Service Reference which I would then use in LINQPad to do some testing against my web service. Created a new linqpad script and added my reference to the assembly and wrote a method to call my web service. Upon executing I received an InvalidOperationException:

Could not find default endpoint element that references contract 'WCFAcctMgmtWebServiceReference.AccountManagementWebservicesSoap' in the ServiceModel client configuration section. This might be because no configuration file was found for your application, or because no endpoint element matching this contract could be found in the client element.

That is odd I can see that my assembly includes a file Proxy.exe.config that has the necessary service reference information

<system.serviceModel>
	<bindings>
		<basicHttpBinding>
			<binding name="AccountManagementWebservicesSoap" />
		</basicHttpBinding>
	</bindings>
	<client>
		<endpoint address="http://ws.domain.com/acctmgmt/v4/service.asmx"
			binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="AccountManagementWebservicesSoap"
			contract="WCFAcctMgmtWebServiceReference.AccountManagementWebservicesSoap"
			name="AccountManagementWebservicesSoap" />
	</client>
</system.serviceModel>

So why was it not working?

Answer:

Well it turns out that LINQPad needs to have this configuration information included in a file it uses since it is the application executing the proxy. At first glance one might assume they would place it in the the file included with LINQPad called LINQPad.exe.config but that would result in the same issue.

Instead you need to create a file in the same directory that LINQPad is installed in and name it linqpad.config

Adding the following to my new file resolved the issue

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
	<system.serviceModel>
		<bindings>
			<basicHttpBinding>
				<binding name="AccountManagementWebservicesSoap" />
			</basicHttpBinding>
		</bindings>
		<client>
			<endpoint address="http://ws.domain.com/acctmgmt/v4/service.asmx"
				binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="AccountManagementWebservicesSoap"
				contract="WCFAcctMgmtWebServiceReference.AccountManagementWebservicesSoap"
				name="AccountManagementWebservicesSoap" />
		</client>
	</system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

 Hopefully this article will save someone the time I spent figuring this out.

Getting LINQPad to read your applications App.Config settings

01 June 2012 jscott

I have been using LINQPad for a while now and I love it. This utility allows me to write and execute immediately code that I am working out before I put it into my project. However on occassion I need to reference assemblies from my project that are getting settings from the applications App.Config such as SQL connection strings etc...

Each time I would run into this I would search and not come up with how to get my app.config settings to be honored by LINQPad and today I finally found how to do it so I thought I would write up something really quick to show others how to accomplish this.

1) Find the path that LINQPad uses for its configuration file by excuting this: AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile.Dump()

This returned for me the following: C:\Program Files\LINQPad4\LINQPad.config

I was suprised this returned LINQPad.config instead of LINQPad.exe.config which is what you would typically expect since most .NET applications name the file the same as the executable.

2) Take your App.config and copy it to the location above naming the config file whatever yours returned. In my case it was LINQPad.config

3) Close LINQPad or the TAB that you have opened to execute your assembly and reopen to get LINQPad to read the configuration file.

Now execute your code and you should see that LINQPad is now pulling in your settings as needed.