The WCF Test Harness is a flexible tool that can be used to quickly test services. The utility is a windows application that uses WCF to submit requests via a given URL or proxy class.

This utility is similar to other WCF test tools, notably WCF Load Test.

The WCF Test Harness is primarily a utility to quickly identify if a service is available and to gain an early understanding of the service.  In practice, the utility was used during the development of solutions where the technology being used had an overhead that made quick appraisal of services cumbersome (e.g., BizTalk Server and SharePoint).

The test harness has the following key features:

• Add a reference to a proxy contained in an assembly
• Generate a proxy based on a given URL
• Generate an XML representation of the request that can be edited as text
• Record the response time of a submitted request
• Provide the ability to submit multiple requests on separate threads
• Provide the ability to save and load tests

Guides

WCF Test Harness: Sample Contract and Test Host

WCF Test Harness: Adding a New Proxy Via URL

WCF Test Harness: Adding a New Proxy Via Assembly

WCF Test Harness: Create New Test Case

WCF Test Harness: Creating a Stub Service

 

---

Posted Tue, Nov 11 2008 8:29 PM by chilberto