Mono WebServices

Whilst converting fellow CLUG’er Mark to Mono (on Windows no less!) last night, I decided to revisit my promise to publish my ‘Hello’ web service. Whilst chatting to him, I re-coded it as a Mono ASP.NET Web Service which can be seen here.

Writing the Web Service

My web service ‘page’ consists of one line:

 <%@ WebService Language="c#" Class="Schwuk.HelloWorld" %>

Whilst my web service ‘logic’ (code behind as usual) consists of:

 using System;
 using System.Web.Services;

 namespace Schwuk
 {

 [WebService(Namespace="http://schwuk.com",Description="Very simple test webservice")]
         public class HelloWorld : System.Web.Services.WebService
         {
                 [WebMethod(Description="Says Hello")]
                 public string SayHello(string Name)
                 {
                         return String.Format("Hello {0}", Name);
                 }
         }
 }

This is compiled with:

 $ mcs -t:library -r:System.Web.Services -out:bin/HelloWorld.dll HelloWorld.cs

Consuming the Web Service

The easiest way to consume the web service is to use it’s WSDL file (you can find mine here) to create a proxy client.

You’ve got two ways of doing this from Mono/.NET:

1. Use the proxy client generated by the web service itself
2. Generate a proxy client using the WSDL tool

Since the first option is pretty self explanatory, I’ll quickly demonstrate the second option.

 $ wsdl -n:Schwuk http://schwuk.com/wip/HelloWorld.asmx?wsdl

This generates a HelloWorld.cs file that can be included in your project. I specify a namespace with the -n: option, but that’s optional.

Demonstrating the Web Service

I re-implemented my original HelloWorld app as HelloWorldClient using this new web service. You can grab the MonoDevelop project here or the client itself in the following forms:

• Executable
• Tarball
• Zip

Here it is running on Linux:

and here running on XP (courtesy of Mark):

This is the same executable – no recompilation was required.