DevTnT 7 – Web Service Studio and Similar Tools Help To Invoke Web Methods Manually

Web Service Studio is a free tool to invoke Web Methods interactively. The user can provide a WSDL endpoint. By clicking the button “Get” the tool fetches the WSDL, generates .NET proxy from the WSDL and displays the list of methods available. The user can choose any method and provide the required input parameters. On clicking Invoke the SOAP request is sent to the server and the response is parsed to display the return value.

On the second tab “Request/Response” you can specify an XML message to send to the Web Service. On the third tab “WSDLs & Proxy” you can investigate the proxy code that was autogenerated from the XSD. There is an option to save it into a file.

The tool is very useful for testing your Web Services easily without writing client code. In one of our customer projects we call the Web Services directly for executing some seldom maintainance operations.

See http://www.codeplex.com/WebserviceStudio or http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/webservicestudio20 for download and further information.

soapUI

Similar functionality for WSDL or REST based Web Services offers the free and open source desktop application soapUI. It provides

• inspecting Web Services
• invoking Web Services
• developing Web Services
• Web Services Simulation and Mocking
• Functional, Load and Compliance testing of Web Services

It can be found at http://www.soapui.org/.

Microsoft’s WcfTestClient.exe

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Test Client (WcfTestClient.exe) is a GUI tool that enables users to input test parameters, submit that input to the service, and view the response that the service sends back. It provides a seamless service testing experience when combined with WCF Service Host.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb552364.aspx