namespace of WCF

[George_George]

Hello everyone, For the namespace defined for WCF, e.g. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731835.aspx

[ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://Microsoft.ServiceModel.Samples")]

my question is, what is it usage for developer? The only usage I found is used by the proxy class generated by meta data, and transparent to developer. When do we need to deal with namespace? thanks in advance, George

[jkersch]

well, at least in my company, we use namespaces e.g. for versioning. for example:

[ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://www.mycompany.com/product/2007/12")]

and

[ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://www.mycompany.com/product/2008/08")]

notice the difference? at least for us this eases versioning. but i guess this is just one reason for using namespaces

[George_George]

Thanks jkersch, But even if they are of different namespaces, the client of WCF does not need namespace information to access, just need endpoint address, correct? My question is, does the client of WCF needs to use the namespace? regards, George

[jkersch]

hi george, well...i guess this depends on your scenario. if you just want to simply consume a webservice, you probably won't need adding namespaces to your servicecontracts. but if things get larger, complexer, ... i guess it's doesn't harm starting to add namespaces to you services, but as i said, if you're in a simple scenario, your clients probably don't care about namespaces at all. regards j.

[George_George]

Thanks jkersch, I agree with your comments. But from WCF client point of view, there is no need to provide namespace information of the service, only endpoint information is fine. Agree? So, my confusion is how could WCF client use namespace? regards, George

[jkersch]

well, if you ask how you could retrieve the service namespace from withing the client, thats not very complicated. your service proxy has an Endpoint property that contains information about the service endpoint. there you can find a contract-property that contains (with some other information) the namespace. it's up to you wheter you can use the service namespace in the client, but i guess in most cases where you just simply want to communicate with a service, do some stuff and disconnect after it, you don't have to bother with namespace on the client side. But at least there is the possibility to use it (like most of the stuff in WCF, hardly anyone will ever use ALL of its features ;) regards j.

[George_George]

Thanks jkersch, 1. My question is, I have read through here, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733133.aspx[^] but it does not contain any description about how to use namespace information of the remote WCF service, do you have any samples or documents to refer to me about how to utilize namespace from client side? 2. How namespace information is used at server side? regards, George