Attaching a Web Reference

Visual Studio .NET has a special name for the machinery that hooks up a Web Service client to the server—Web reference. A Web reference consists of the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and any related disco files. It also includes the automatically generated code that the client uses to call the Web Service. We call this generated code the proxy.

NOTE

What is a disco file? It's a term for the Web Service discovery files. A given Web Service application may have multiple Web Services running within the same .NET binary. The disco file enumerates the services available within that binary by listing the paths to the WSDL files. Within .NET, that typically maps to a listing of all the .asmx files in the directory ...

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