Something I ran into today made me do a double take. This could have originated from the initial configuration choice I made when setting up Visual Studio 2010 or the tool is trying to be so smart it starts to get confusing..
However it happened, it does seem to make things more difficult when trying to create windows form applications. In particular, if you want to use a web-reference in your regular windows application the number of clicks has increased and discoverability has decreased.
Adding web-references to consume web services in ASP.NET application is not impacted by this change. In particular the context sensitive links to add web-reference are gone when I am in the Solution Explorer working on a Windows Form Application.
Instead the only thing you can seemingly do is to add a service reference. Though you can start here, web services that are registered through this channel do not behave at all like the previous releases of Visual Studio. Thus, beware, this is not what you want to do if you want to consume a regular web service, especially ones that are not created with VS to begin with. To get to the plain Jane adding of a web service you have to walk through some additional steps.
A) Select the “Add Service Reference…” option, then, click on the “Advanced…” button.
B) Click on the “Add Web Service” button from the advanced screen:
Allright that should do it to bring you back into the old web service ways.
Cheers,
B