bijesh.net

Using WSE 3 in Visual Studio 2008

Web Service Enhancements 3 (WSE 3) is not officially supported for Visual Studio 2008. The reason is that Microsoft wants you migrate your code to WCF. Believe me, it’s not easy to convert a client application using WSE 3 to WCF.

So, how do you make WSE 3 work with Visual Studio 2008? Here are the steps.

Go to the folder %ALLUSERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins).

Open the file WSESettingsVS3.AddIn in notepad. You’ll have this file if WSE 3 is installed. You’ll find two <HostApplication> sections. Note that the version is 8.0. Copy and paste these two sections and change the version of the new sections to 9.0. After the changes are made, the file should look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16" standalone="no"?>
<Extensibility 
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AutomationExtensibility">
  <HostApplication>
    <Name>Microsoft Visual Studio Macros</Name>
    <Version>8.0</Version>
  </HostApplication>
  <HostApplication>
    <Name>Microsoft Visual Studio</Name>
    <Version>8.0</Version>
  </HostApplication>
 <HostApplication>
  <Name>Microsoft Visual Studio Macros</Name>
  <Version>9.0</Version>
 </HostApplication>
 <HostApplication>
  <Name>Microsoft Visual Studio</Name>
  <Version>9.0</Version>
 </HostApplication>
  <Addin>
    <FriendlyName>WSE Settings 3.0...</FriendlyName>
    <Description>WSE Settings Tool.</Description>
    <Assembly>C:\Program Files\Microsoft WSE\v3.0\Tools\WseSettingsVS3.dll</Assembly>
    <FullClassName>WseSettings.Connect</FullClassName>
    <LoadBehavior>1</LoadBehavior>
    <CommandPreload>0</CommandPreload>
    <CommandLineSafe>0</CommandLineSafe>
  </Addin>
</Extensibility>

Save the file. This should be enough to add the add-in to Visual Studio 2008.

Now, open the devenv.exe.config file. You can find this file in the same folder where your visual studio application resides. Add the following snippet just above the closing </configuration> tag inside the file. This helps Visual Studio to generate web service proxy classes using WSE.

<system.web> 
    <webServices> 
        <soapExtensionImporterTypes> 
            <add type="Microsoft.Web.Services3.Description.WseExtensionImporter, 
               Microsoft.Web.Services3, Version=3.0.0.0, 
               Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> 
        </soapExtensionImporterTypes> 
    </webServices> 
</system.web> 

Close all the instances of Visual Studio 2008 and start the application again.

Enable HTTP Compression on IIS for ASP.Net

If you enable HTTP compression on IIS, it does not enable compression for aspx files by default. You will have to edit the metabase or run the following commands and they will do it for you.

Important step: Make a backup of the file %windir%\System32\inetsrv\MetaBase.xml. If something goes wrong, then copy the original file back and restart the iis server.

Open a command prompt (cmd) and CD to the directory \Inetpub\AdminScripts.

Execute the following commands one at a time and verify that there are no errors.

net stop iisadmin

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/parameters/HcDoDynamicCompression true

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/parameters/HcDoStaticCompression true

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcFileExtensions “htm” “html” “txt” “ppt” “xls” “xml” “pdf” “xslt” “doc” “xsl” “htc” “js” “css”

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcFileExtensions “htm” “html” “txt” “ppt” “xls” “xml” “pdf” “xslt” “doc” “xsl” “htc” “js” “css”

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcScriptFileExtensions “asp” “dll” “exe” “aspx” “asmx” “ashx”

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcScriptFileExtensions “asp” “dll” “exe” “aspx” “asmx” “ashx”

net start w3svc

Done.

One of our web pages was about 3MB size and after compressing it, the page is only 170KB. That was about 30s improvement in page load time.