Unit testing an asmx Web Service in Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 has Unit testing support built into it, whereby you can define batches of unit tests and run them as part of your build process.

However, when I tried writing a test against an asmx Web Service, I could not get it to work using the .asmx (endpoint/page) request.

I used a web request style unit test:

[TestMethod()]
[HostType(“ASP.NET”)]
[AspNetDevelopmentServerHost(“C:\\projects\\fooService”, “/”)]
[UrlToTest(“http://localhost:62534/fooService)%5D”>http://localhost:62534/fooService”)]

public void GetFooTest()
{
      fooService svc = new fooService();
     foo.doSomething();
    Assert(blah, blah);

Unfortunately, this does not work and most likely you will get a 404.
I got this error when I ran my unit test:

Could not connect to the Web server for page ‘http://localhost:62534/fooService’. The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.. Check that the Web server is running and visible on the network and that the page specified exists.

I tried a few hacks like adding a default page to the service project and specifying that in the UrlToTest attribute, etc. but to no avail.

Finally, I resorted to just adding a Service Reference to the target and removed the three web attributes. This means that my service class is instantiated directly and not through a web service request but honestly I don’t care about the transport part. I’m mainly interested in testing functionality anyway.

Hope this post helps…

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Debugging: "There was an error reflecting type ‘foo’."

I came across this error while serializing an entity class using an XmlSerializer, and realized one of the causes for the error is when the class being serialized does not have a default (empty) constructor.
I had added a parameterized constructor to provide some syntactic sugar, and started getting the error.

So, if you get this type of error, define a default constructor to fix the serialization error.
public class foo()
{
     public foo () { }
}

Note: You can pinpoint the class by going through the chain of Inner Exceptions.

 

Debugging problem: “There is no source code available…”

Just wanted to write about a baffling problem I came across while debugging my web service in Visual Studio 2008.
I was running in debug mode and when I called a method that I had set up breakpoints in, I kept getting an error stating “There is no source code available at this location”.

As always, one should take a step back and try to understand the issue.
The message seemed to indicate that the assembly debug symbols/information and code were out of sync. To verify that, I made a change to the names to one of my web service methods and sure enough, the (auto-generated) debug page for an asmx still showed the old method name. Clearly, my code was not being built.
I fixed the problem by checking the Build checkbox (which somehow got unchecked) in the Solution – Properties – Configuration VS dialog.
As a side, always ensure that your assemblies are built the way you assume they are. Maybe, even delete the dll files to be sure and then do a build/debug and ensure that, if you’re using Internet Explorer to debug), the “Show friendly errors” and “Disable debugging” is off.