The back end code was very basic and really only like it is to allow me to start attempting to write a client which will consume services.
Switching over to the Windows Phone 7 development, I hit my first problem. I created a VB.Net Windows Phone application and tried to add a Service Reference to the project. I gave the URL of the service that I created in the previous entry and it came back with the correct information. I then named the service and clicked the Ok button. A few seconds later I started to get errors and warnings. The main error is shown here:
Custom tool error: Failed to generate code for the service reference
One of the things that seemed to cause issues is the service definition using wsHttpBinding, but after double checking, I had used basicHttpBinding which is currently the only supported binding for Windows Phone 7
Initially, I thought this was a VB.Net problem, but after some searching there were a few C# users out there with the same issue. Most of them had one thing in common. They had Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition installed. I then found someone who mentioned that the Visual Studio Express edition does not have this issue. So I un-installed Ultimate from my laptop (Which took me a whole weekend due to the amount of things that got installed, think before clicking complete in future 😉 ) and then went to download Visual Studio 2010 Express edition. Once this was installed I then re-installed the Windows Phone 7 SDK and the VB extension to the SDK and hit my second problem.
This first release of Visual Basic support for the Windows Phone Developer Tools requires that you have Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher, and does not yet support Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
So stopped there as well. At this point I was starting to get annoyed at the lack of VB.net support in general after the promise of joint evolution of the two languages. So I went back to web searching to try to see if there was any other solutions apart from the manual approach. I found that one person mentioned that it didn’t work in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate bit DID work in Visual Studio 2010 Professional. So back to installing software, This time Visual Studio 2010 Professional.
That done, I re-loaded the Windows Phone 7 project and right clicked the service and selected Update Service Definition. I waited with bated breath to see if it would work and it did. A huge sigh of relief I went on to start coding a client side of the learning project.
Note to self: “Just because you have an MSDN subscription which includes the Ultimate version of visual studio, it doesn’t mean that you should install it!”
…To be continued
Jas
VB Magic 