This is a blog post I should have done months ago, but finally I am getting around to it.
Where I work we have many web services to support. Every new release it seems we are adding to the services or making changes to them. From the development standpoint we can create unit tests to test parts of the service, but when the QA folks need to do their testing it was a challenge. See we created an MVC app that just wrapped the services and the QA could use this app to do their testing. It worked ok until one day we started getting bugs opened. See a lot of the bugs were really with the test app and not the services. So now we have to support not only the services but a throw away test app.
I said to myself that this has to change. So I searched for a better way. What I found was the Wizdl tool. This is a great tool. It is not pretty or anything but it gets the job done. How it works is simple. You point it at the web service, and it dynamically creates an interface for it. you can then enter the needed data and it executes the service. On top of that it gives you some other nice things like, taking the response up into fields and displaying the data. It also shows the soap messages for the request and response. The tool also lets you save your data as an xml file so you can load it up later and do a regression test.
If you have to support web services check this tool out. It is free and works great.
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