WSDL visual generation tool

[George Jordanov Ivanov]

Folks,

I have to design the WSDL files of a bunch of XML Web Services. But,
unfortunately, I am not very keen on writing the WSDL file line by line, and
moreover be aware of the whole standard specification in details. I will be
very happy if there is a visual tool, which can do this for me. Does anyone
know such kind of tool (if it is free, this is going to be awesome)?

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
George Ivanov

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Hi George,

Welcome to the MSDN newsgroup.

As for WSDL document, if you're .NET framework sdk or VS.NET ide, it'll
automatically generate the wsdl document for your webservice class.

If you want to manually generate WSDL xml document, as far as I know ,the
XMLSpy tool provide such functionality. In addition, you can also try
searching on the gotdotnet site on some .NET specific webservice tools:

#Web Service Tools
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/tools/...c/default.aspx

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security
(This posting is provided "AS IS", with no warranties, and confers no
rights.)

[George Jordanov Ivanov]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your reply. My goal is to write the WSDL file manually because I
want to put additional headers, types and SOAP messages (I want to have a
valid XML schema which will verify te SOAP messages that I am gonna dispatch
/ receive). Having these in the WSDL file, VS.NET indeed will automatically
(or manually through wsdl.exe) generate the Web proxy class having
full-blown header properties etc. However, what I am actually looking for is
a tool that will "guide" me so that I can define first the SOAP messages
with their headers, operations and stuff, but after will validate the whole
schema and will define the additional entities like for example parameters
passed to operations etc.

GotDotNet site has good tools indeed but they however does not offer the
functionality that I am looking for. Altova indeed has this Web Services
studio, but so far I haven't reviewed it. Probably I should. However, I will
appreciate if you have other propositions :)

Thans again for you reply!
Regards,
George Jordanov Ivanov

On gotdotnet.org
"Steven Cheng[MSFT]" <st*****@online.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:Dk*************@TK2MSFTNGXA01.phx.gbl...

Hi George,

Welcome to the MSDN newsgroup.

As for WSDL document, if you're .NET framework sdk or VS.NET ide, it'll
automatically generate the wsdl document for your webservice class.

If you want to manually generate WSDL xml document, as far as I know ,the
XMLSpy tool provide such functionality. In addition, you can also try
searching on the gotdotnet site on some .NET specific webservice tools:

#Web Service Tools
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/tools/...c/default.aspx

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security
(This posting is provided "AS IS", with no warranties, and confers no
rights.)

[George Jordanov Ivanov]

Folks,

I found the tool I was looking for - it is named WsContractFirst. It
actually follows Microsoft's recommendation of writing WSDL contract first
and most of all is free. Check it out at:
http://www.thinktecture.com/Resource...t/default.html

A simple tutorial how to work with this Visual Studio 2003 add-in can be
found here:
http://www.thinktecture.com/resource...t/default.html

I managed to create the WSDL files I was planning using both this tutorial
and the add-in itself. One drawback that I find is that this tool so far is
not ported for Visual Studio 2005, but I guess that soon the its creators
will fix this.

Regards,
George Jordanov Ivanov

"George Jordanov Ivanov" <ge***********@newsgroups.nospam> wrote in message
news:eB*************@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your reply. My goal is to write the WSDL file manually because
I want to put additional headers, types and SOAP messages (I want to have
a valid XML schema which will verify te SOAP messages that I am gonna
dispatch / receive). Having these in the WSDL file, VS.NET indeed will
automatically (or manually through wsdl.exe) generate the Web proxy class
having full-blown header properties etc. However, what I am actually
looking for is a tool that will "guide" me so that I can define first the
SOAP messages with their headers, operations and stuff, but after will
validate the whole schema and will define the additional entities like for
example parameters passed to operations etc.

GotDotNet site has good tools indeed but they however does not offer the
functionality that I am looking for. Altova indeed has this Web Services
studio, but so far I haven't reviewed it. Probably I should. However, I
will appreciate if you have other propositions :)

Thans again for you reply!
Regards,
George Jordanov Ivanov

On gotdotnet.org
"Steven Cheng[MSFT]" <st*****@online.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:Dk*************@TK2MSFTNGXA01.phx.gbl...

Hi George,

Welcome to the MSDN newsgroup.

As for WSDL document, if you're .NET framework sdk or VS.NET ide, it'll
automatically generate the wsdl document for your webservice class.

If you want to manually generate WSDL xml document, as far as I know ,the
XMLSpy tool provide such functionality. In addition, you can also try
searching on the gotdotnet site on some .NET specific webservice tools:

#Web Service Tools
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/tools/...c/default.aspx

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security
(This posting is provided "AS IS", with no warranties, and confers no
rights.)

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Thanks for your followup George,

Glad that you've found the one.

Actually the tool you mentioned is supporting developing webservice
through the Contract-First approach. Here is one MSDN article discussing on
this:

#Contract-First Service Development
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/is...erviceStation/

Hope this also helps.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security
(This posting is provided "AS IS", with no warranties, and confers no
rights.)

[George Jordanov Ivanov]

Hi Steven,

Actually I found this tool when I read exactly this atricle. There is one
update on WsContractFirst tool - today they released version 0.6 which now
supports Visual Studio 2005.

Enjoy!
George

"Steven Cheng[MSFT]" <st*****@online.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:ej**************@TK2MSFTNGXA01.phx.gbl...

Thanks for your followup George,

Glad that you've found the one.

Actually the tool you mentioned is supporting developing webservice
through the Contract-First approach. Here is one MSDN article discussing
on
this:

#Contract-First Service Development
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/is...erviceStation/

Hope this also helps.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security
(This posting is provided "AS IS", with no warranties, and confers no
rights.)

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

That's cool George,

Good luck!

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security
(This posting is provided "AS IS", with no warranties, and confers no
rights.)

[jtfml]

Hi Steven,

I hope you can enlighten me. I'm very new to web services. I'm using visual studio.net 2005. I've gone through every tutorial that I've found and my C# book and I've looked at many forums on the Internet. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the 2.0 .net framework. When I try to create an application that will reference a web service that I have created, I get the following response.

The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A name was started with an invalid character. Error processing resource 'file:///C:/Documents and Settings/JT/My Documents/...

<%@ WebService Language="C#" CodeBehind="~/App_Code/Testing.cs" Class="Testing" %>
-^

If I try to run this web service from the development environment in debug mode it works fine.

If I try to create the web service as an http style location using localhost I get the following response when I try to run it.

HTTP 500 - Internal server error
Internet Explorer

No other explanation is given. When I try to add this web service as a reference, I get the same http 500 error. The only web service that I can even get a response from is the ReportingServices.WSDL. This is the only one that has a WSDL extension. I cannot figure out how to create the WSDL files. I cannot figure out why localhost does not like my web services. I believe that if I cannot access these WSDL files that I will not be able to obtain the web service proxy class. I have a guide that shows what is in a typical web service proxy class, but I don't think that I want to start out using web services that way. There are too many things that I don't understand yet. For instance, what is placed on the web server and where is it placed? I believe that if I could get the http location specification for a web service to work, that I would not have to worry about what was placed and where. This is a critical piece that is holding up the completion of a project that I'm working on. Can you help me out?

Thanks,

JT