Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Use Dynamic URLs When Referencing Web Services
If you want to call a Web service, you must first add a Web reference to your project.
This generates a proxy class through which you interact with the Web service. The proxy
code initially contains a static Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the Web service; for
example, http://localhost or http://SomeWebServer.
Important: For Web services in your current solution that execute on your computer,
always use http://localhost rather than http://MyComputerName to ensure that the
reference remains valid on all computers.
The static URL that is embedded within the proxy is usually not the URL that you require
in either the production or test environment. Typically, the required URL varies as your
application moves from development to test to production. You have three options to
address this issue:
• You can programmatically set the Web service URL when you create an instance of
the proxy class.
• A more flexible approach that avoids a hard-coded URL in the proxy is to set the
URL Behavior property of the Web service reference to Dynamic. This is the
preferred approach. When you set the property to Dynamic, code is added to the
proxy class to retrieve the Web service URL from a custom configuration section of
the application configuration file—Web.config for a Web application or
SomeApp.exe.config for a Windows application.
• You can also generate the proxy by using the WSDL.exe command-line tool and
specifying the /urlkey switch. This works in a similar way to setting the URL
Behavior property in that it adds code to the proxy to retrieve the Web service URL,
but in this case the URL is stored in the section of the
application configuration file.
The dynamic URL approach also lets you provide a user configuration file, which can
override the main application configuration file. This allows separate developers (and
members of the test team) to temporarily redirect a Web service reference to an alternate
location.
Additional Resources
• For more information, see “Chapter 6 - Managing Source Control Dependencies in
Visual Studio Team System” in this guide.
Distributed / Remote Development
• Make sure that you get an appropriately sized disk drive for your proxy.
• Create a scheduled task to pull the latest files on a periodic basis.
• Periodically monitor proxy performance counters and the event log.
• Configure executionTimeout based on file sizes and bandwidth.
• Disable the proxy if it is going to be down for an extended time period.
• Consider workspace cloaking to reduce unnecessary file transfers.