Testing a WCF Service Application

Question

How can you test a WCF Service Application like you could do with ASP.NET Web Services? When I run the WCF Service Application, I would expect a test page to appear that would allow me to test all the services contained in the web application. This does not happen. Am I missing how to do this?

Answer 1

There is no web interface for testing your service. However, depending on which features your service are using you might be able to use the WCF Test Client included in the SDK. Unfortunately it has a lot of limitations so it wont work on all services.

From msdn:

The following is a list of features not supported by WCF Test Client:

Types: Stream, Message, XmlElement, XmlAttribute, XmlNode, types that implement the IXmlSerializable interface, including the related XmlSchemaProviderAttribute attribute, and the XDocument and XElement types, the ADO.NET DataTable type and the DataSet type (as well as its typed-derived classes).

Duplex contract.

Transaction.

Security: CardSpace , Certificate, and Username/Password.

Bindings: WSFederationbinding, any Context bindings and Https binding, WebHttpbinding (Json response message support).