How to add a service reference to a WCF client for a web service requiring client authentication certificate

Question

Caution, WCF noobie alert

I need to create a WCF client to query a non-WCF web service. The web service is not a WCF service. Additionally, the web service requires a client authentication certificate. Now, I have the certificate, and can create a non-WCF client that works perfectly; I was able to 'Add Web Reference' and a certificate dialog box opened up to allow me to select the appropriate certificate, then went on to create the web reference. Trying to create a WCF client via 'Add Service Reference' is another story, it just fails with a 403 Access Denied error.

I have the WSDL for the service, and have run svcutil.exe on it, but am not sure how to proceed from there.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I'm assuming that the service you are using is performing client SSL authentication.

Since add service reference is failing, you can use svcutil to generate the client from the WSDL file that you have. I think the syntax would be something like:

svcutil *.wsdl /l:C# /out:Reference.cs /config /s /ct:System.Collections.Generic.List`1 /ser:Auto /tcv:Version35 /n:*,<NameOfYourNamespaceHere> /edb

This will generate a file, Reference.cs, that contains the proxy classes to the service (you can give this file whatever name you want). Add this file to your project. A config file, output.config, will also be generated. You can add this configuration to your application configuration instead of typing it all in by hand.

Now you can follow this MSDN article on using Transport Security with Certificate Authentication. You can skip down to the client section where it shows how to attach the certificate to the request in code as well as in configuration.