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Ah, but you're making assumptions. The *development environment* is doing that, not .NET itself. If you do all of this manually, guess what? It takes about the same number of steps in .NET as VFP...
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But if the dev environment takes care of and directs the process, does it really matter? Actually, what I am interested in is whether anybody has benchmarked .NET web services vs VFP/COM Component-based web services. I agree that the ends are the same. I do feel the means employed in .NET are a bit more straight forward.


>A Web Reference is really a proxy object that VS generates and injects into your project and that object is hardcoded with the WSDL path and a few other things. Now if you recompile VS goes out and checks to see if something's changed and if it has recompiles the proxy.
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>I've built wwSOAP a long time ago around the same principal - by creating a VFP proxy object around the call wrapper you get a single object instance that's fully VFP capable including Intellisense.
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>My point here is that this can be done in VFP just the same and in fact in my environment is automatic (granted I wrote that, but that's a simple automation procedure). It's a Dev Environment issue which simply means the VS people included it into the shell. The VFP team can do the same type of thing with very little effort. Today any developer who uses the SOAP Toolkit can do this by adding a project hook and automating the WSDL wizard or with Web Connection use the SoapHelper class to generate the WSDL on the fly from that same hook. In either case it's a handful of lines of code that are canned.
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That is a good point that with a little work, the developer can add code to do what the .NET dev environment does already. Again, I did qualify by questioning whether it was a big deal. In the end, unless there is a performance difference, I guess it does not matter. It is nice the .NET dev environment takes care of the nitty gritty work for the developer.