Tobi + C# = T#

I just installed Orcas Beta 2 for the first time. And I was so lucky as to run into an (small) problem within the first 2 minutes of using it. I seriously don’t know how I do that, but it seems to happen every time I use a beta product. When starting my first WCF Service in 2008 by hitting F5 I was immediatelly greeted by an Exception.

Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘svcutil, Version=3.0.0.0, [blabla] Strong name validation failed.

Well, in this case the culprit was svcutil.exe, to be more specific a missing signing. There is an easy way around this problem. Locate the svcutil.exe (usually located “%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\V6.0A\Bin\svcutil.exe”) an tell .NET to skip sigrnature verification for it by using
sn -Vr "%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\V6.0A\Bin\svcutil.exe"

Happy coding.

Recently I have been looking into WCF and I don’t know why, but it took me quite a while to collect all the tools necessary to start coding for real. So todays post will be a WCF – a setup. For all you advanced users out that have read 100 WCF Hello Worlds already – skip it or bear with me. I promise more interesting stuff in my next post. So without further ado, I present to you:

How to setup WCF for the slow ones like me

I assume you are working under WinXP, VS2005 and don’t have a clue about WCF, like I do right now. IIS is installed, .NET 3.0 Framework is installed.

First I got the very basic instructions from Microsoft (download samples). Make sure you follow the one-time setup instructions. I didn’t and wondered for a few minutes about raised exceptions just because I did not execute:

"%WINDIR%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation\ServiceModelReg.exe" -r

Make absolutely sure to run that command, if you installed the IIS after .NET 3.0, yeah, I felt kinda stupid right there and then.

I advise you to also install “Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit for Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Component” (here) and afterwards the “Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF)” (here). Right now the November 2006 CTP of the extensions is current. And while you’re at it, it might be a good idea to install the “Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools” (here) as well. They contain a whole bunch of interesting tools. Plus when you plan on looking into Workflows as well “Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation)” (here).