Add Web Reference Bugaboo
While VS.NET’s whole "Add Web Reference" concept is cool, it utterly falls down in the face of multiple services exposed by the same back end. WSS exposes a multitude of web services. But VS.NET doesn’t have any way to specify that multiple web services should all be in the same namespace. So you end up each service in it’s own namespace like server1, server2, etc.
Luckily, WSDL.exe doesn’t have this problem. And VS.NET 2003 support custom build steps so it’s pretty easy to execute WSDL.exe as part of a standard build. So it’s only a minor annoyance.
I wonder if you could build your own custom Add Web Reference system via VSIP? Probably not worth the trouble. But it does make me curious – is anyone looking at using VSIP on their shareware/freeware tool to integrate it more tightly into the VS.NET shell? I see Scott Hanselman has a great list of potentials. (He even included my SccSwitch utility – I’m honored!)