Is there an alternative for WCF Test Client application with better Facilities?

Question

I use wcf test client for testing my wcf services, but it has some shortages. Is there an alternative for WCF Test Client application with better Facilities?

Pharos

What kind of testing are you after? since wcf is transparent to the actual protocal used, i usually do regular unit tests on instances of the classes that implement my service references. – Gabbi

I use wcf test client for testing return values of my service OperationContracts. – Pharos

right, but for the purpose of testing that the service is set up properly (with regards to ports and network access and so on) or to verify that the service returns the correct result for a given input? – Gabbi

to verify that the service returns the correct result for a given input. – Pharos

Check out WCF Storm – Entremets

Can methods be sorted in WCFTestClient alphabetically? – Stalk

Answer 1

Yes there is better application with much bigger feature set called SoapUI but it is not integrated with Visual Studio and its bigger feature set expect that you understand web services. SoapUI is probably leading tool for testing web services and it has free edition but it is not related to MS technologies and because of that it probably doesn't support WCF only features (like duplex, net.tcp, etc.)

Anyway if you want to have testing tool for your service there is nothing more easier then creating test (MS test, NUnit or any other framework) and simply use a proxy to test your deployed service.

Continually

Unfortunately, SoapUI isn't the best of applications, as Ladi noted it doesn't actually support the .NET stack. It is better suited to Java developers testing HTTP services and SOAP endpoints. – Moye

Answer 2

I am using WCF Storm which let me save big methods with a lot of parameters in XML. So I can easily load them back later by simply copy-pasting it back. But, the software (at the current stage 2.5.0) lacks of finish... shorcuts are something counter intuitive and recursive cause sometime problem. Still, it's a great application that offer more than the default Wcf Test Client.

Baur

Answer 3

Based on your comments i suggest using an unit testing framework such as MSTest or NUnit

In your tests you can setup instances of your service as you would normally, then call them as you would in your production code and verify the results.

Note also that you dont have to launch a whole service host to do this, you can simply make an instance of the class that is implementing your service contract and call it directly. there are some differences to doing this and hosting the service (when hosting, arguments are always serialized, that is, they are passed by value, not by reference) but it usually doesnt matter.

Gabbi