Consuming a Web Service from Microsoft Visual Studio

To consume a Web Service from Microsoft Visual Studio 2012, select Add Service Reference... from the Project menu. Enter the address https://_yourserver/yourdataset_/services/_yourwebservice_.svc and click Go. In the Namespace box, change the default name to your preferred .NET namespace for the generated proxy classes. Then click OK.

Tip: If you want to consume all or most web services listed under https://_yourserver/yourdataset_/services/, you may enter that URL instead. This will make Visual Studio generate client proxy classes for all web services in one operation. Another advantage is that it is a lot easier to update the client classes if the web services are changed at a later point in time.

Once generated it is easy to update the generated client proxy classes to reflect changes to the web service interface(s). In the Solution Explorer, navigate to Solution 'YourSolution' -> YourProject -> Service References -> YourServiceReference. Right-click on YourServiceReference and select Update Service Reference.

In order to use the web service proxy classes generated above, you typically have to do the following:

1. Import the generated web service namespace(s) in your code (i.e. by the "using" keyword in C#).
2. Create an instance of your custom web service class, e.g. yourwebserviceClient.
3. Assign credentials according to the authentication scheme used by the web service by setting yourwebserviceClient._ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName and _yourwebserviceClient.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password, or -- if Windows Authentication is used -- by setting _yourwebserviceClient._ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.
4. Call the web service operation, e.g. yourwebserviceClient.youroperation(), passing any expected input parameters, and process any returned response.

A code example written in C# is provided here.