WCF and Silverligth 2 - Beta 1 and automated builds

One issue I ran into recently was the fact that currently the Silverlight 2 autogenerated client code for WCF services is autogenerated. This is not a big deal typically, but here is where I found some issues... (actually it wasn't me but this guy Sina that found the problem and some one on Mike H's team that explained it) but this is what was found.

We are doing this pretty big silverlight application that is pretty much a shrink wrapped quality solution. Part of the implementation of this is a complete automated build system for QA and part of that was the fact that the production environment is a huge hands off big no touching sort thing.

In this particular application we have a number of WCF services that we are talking to, that are local in the web solution along with the silverlight application. When you run this in Visual Studio it works well. When we deployed it we noticed we had to deploy the solution, re do the references to the deployed WCF service and then deploy again. a bit of a pain but in and automated scenerio using msbuild and the like and you have no idea what the url will be, this is extremely problematic.

We also found a nice service client config file with the url settings for the server etc in the compiled xap but when changed this didn't seem to do anything. Much to our sadness we found out that we might look for this in the next version and the file though created was ignored. The solution that hopefully will go away in Beta 2 is to over-right all our constructors and pass in a value we configure in the web.config... Basically something like this:

ServiceClient MyClient = new ServiceClient( new BasicHttpBinding(), new EndpointAddress( new Uri(SomeConfigValueAsString)));

basically overright which constructor is used and pass in the value that would normally be compiled directly into the dll. A hack I know but it works until we get that beta 2 and we can still use our WCF service.