Some Creativity

Had to do a bit of head-scratching on this one. New projects created in Visual Studio 2008 did show the “Add Service Reference” when right-clicking on a project in Solution Explorer while some existing ones didn’t.

Using “Add Web Reference” instead of “Add Service Reference” has its own set of issues in that WCF services are meant to be used with DataContractSerializer. “Add Web Reference” utilizes XmlSerializer which might lead to some surprises when consuming WCF web-services. The way the two serializers handle WSDL is different. This article explains why you might find that property values of your complex types in web-services do not reach all the way to the web-service from the client.

Somebody logged a Microsoft Connect ticket on this but didn’t receive an answer because the issue couldn’t be reproduced.

Anyway, if you’re facing this issue – make sure that the target framework for your project is .NET 3.0 or later (you can do this in the Application tab of your project’s properties). You need to do this extra step if you upgrade your project to Visual Studio 2008 from older versions otherwise “Add Service Reference” wouldn’t appear. You can target .NET 2.0 from Visual Studio 2008 projects and that’s the default behavior during upgrade.

Update: This didn’t fix the issue for you? Check the comments for more alternatives.