DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator Gotcha

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, but this was super unpleasant to uncover.

I’ve got a website up ‘n running and wanted to add a webservice to it, aight? Wizards make the job easy so here i go:

“Add > New item > Asp.Net > Web Service > Ok” Programming has never been so easy…
Navigate to webservice and … *poof!*

Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Line 1333:
Line 1334:    OperationBinding FindHttpBinding(string verb) {
Line 1335:        foreach (ServiceDescription description in serviceDescriptions) {
Line 1336:            foreach (Binding binding in description.Bindings) {
Line 1337:                HttpBinding httpBinding = (HttpBinding)binding.Extensions.Find(typeof(HttpBinding));
    
[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
ASP.defaultwsdlhelpgenerator_aspx.FindHttpBinding(String verb) in
c:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727CONFIGDefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx:1335

Dang wizards! Obviously badly generated code? Not so…
All the performance hints and profilers will tell you, if you don’t need to automatically wire up your events, set the AutoEventWireUp=false (no, i’m not going on a blatant tangent here) in your .config. What they don’t tell you is that the @Page directive influences the generation of Wdsl for your webservice. Obviously. :S

http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/35/177335.aspx

http://forums.asp.net/p/385662/385662.aspx#385662

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;324151

And in the immortal words of John Lennon: “I’m not the only one” (who got duped).

MS, you’re gonna have to do better than that if you want to catch us out 😉

2 replies on “DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator Gotcha”

In case you’re wondering where this is problematic- you cannot add a web-reference to a referencing application ‘cos the wdsl discovery is broken. You can of course “deploy” with AutoEventWireUp=false, provided you don’t need to do discovery on the web service again :S

after some follow-up with leppie, it turns out the whole reason for the fiasco lies in the way the c:WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx file has been implemented. It’s got some embedded server-side script (which needs to wire up event handling, particularly the page_load) in the markup, and it looks more like a classic asp page than anything else. ah well. so you could rewrite that, host it properly and still achieve what you want to achieve.

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