Consuming foreign WSDL from .NET
It all started so well. I had just installed The Mind Electric's GLUE, a really elegant Java-based XML-and-Web-services product that friends have raved about. GLUE autogenerates WSDL, and being curious about interop, I pointed Visual Studio.NET at it. The magic namespace completion worked like a charm! This was really encouraging!
Then things went downhill. I switched the GLUE sample service from returning a string to returning a java.util.Hashtable. GLUE itself was perfectly happy to consume that complex return value, but VS.NET had no clue what to do with it.
Then I hopped over to xmethods and started trying to consume WSDL found there. Results were lousy. A bunch of WSDL files that can be retrieved don't seem to be recognized as Web services at all by VS.NET. Of those that can, only some complete on the service name. Of that subset, only some complete on operations and types. I did finally manage to get VS.NET to consume one or two services that return simple types, but as Kevin Altis said yesterday, it sure feels like work.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/02/14.html#a62