25.10. Building the WCF Client Application

Now that your host is in place, the final task is to build a piece of software to communicate with this WCF service type. While you could take the long road and build the necessary infrastructure by hand (a feasible, but labor-intensive task), the .NET Framework 4.0 SDK provides several approaches to generate a client-side proxy quickly. Begin by creating a new Console Application named MagicEightBallServiceClient.

25.10.1. Generating Proxy Code Using svcutil.exe

The first way you can build a client-side proxy is to use the svcutil.exe command-line tool. Using svcutil.exe, you can generate a new C# language file that represents the proxy code itself, as well as a client-side configuration file. You can do this by specifying the service's endpoint as the first parameter. You use the /out: flag to define the name of the *.cs file containing the proxy, and you use the /config: option to specify the name of the generated client-side *.config file.