Sometimes you may need to get at a service's ServiceDescription (WSDL) from a place where it is not normally accessible. One way to do so that I found is if you've enabled metadata publishing for your service, you can do something like this:


using System.ServiceModel;


using System.ServiceModel.Channels;


using System.ServiceModel.Description;


using WSDL = System.Web.Services.Description;


 


private WSDL.ServiceDescription GetServiceDescription()


{


   OperationContext context = OperationContext.Current;


   ServiceMetadataExtension mex =


      context.Host.Extensions.Find();


   // find the wsdl


   foreach ( MetadataSection section in mex.Metadata.MetadataSections )


   {


      if ( section.Dialect == MetadataSection.ServiceDescriptionDialect


      {


         return (WSDL.ServiceDescription)section.Metadata;


      }


   }


   return null;


}





The only thing to watch out for is that the returned ServiceDescription object won't contain a Service element, but it's otherwise very usable!




Tomas Restrepo

Software developer located in Colombia.