Monday, May 07, 2007

My new Web Service Test tool, WsdlWorks

I've been working on an open source web service test framework for Visual Studio over the last few months. It's called WsdlWorks. That's why I was blogging about creating new VS project types here and here and problems with WCF and WSDL. I've decided to host it on CodePlex because it seems to be the preferred place for Microsoft related open source projects. I just created a new project for it here and uploaded the source. The CodePlex source control client is a pretty basic command line based thing, but it's prefectly fine for a little project like this. Here's a screen shot of WsdlWorks: As you can see it creates a new Visual Studio project, you right click the project node, select 'Add WSDL from URL', enter your WSDL's URL in the dialog that appears and then WsdlWorks automatically creates nodes for all the services and their operations. It also creates initial requests for each operation, but you can add as many as you want. To execute the request, you just right-click on the request node and select 'Run'. When you create a request it reads the WSDL's XSD for the request types and creates example data in the request. I used XmlSampleGenerator, by Priya Lakshminarayanan to do this. I tried to get it working with WCF multipart WSDLs, but haven't succeeded yet. The error handling, icons and other stuff is also still on the 'to do' list, so it's far from production ready, but I thought I'd release it now in the best open source tradition since it's in its initial working state. You can't release Visual Studio packages without a package load key, and you can't get a package load key without having a homepage for your project. But now I've got a homepage I can get the PLK. Expect an installer pretty soon. For the time being, if you want to play with WsdlWorks you'll need .NET 3.0 and the Visual Studio SDK so that you can run it in the experimental hive.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll check this out and comment soon..meanwhile, it might be a good idea to try extending it to autogenerate some test stubs as well...!!

Mike Hadlow said...

Thanks benjy, I really need to get some work done on WsdlWorks, it doesn't even have an installer yet and the code is still a mess.