What is ScvUtil.exe?

Posted on: 2013-03-15

If you want to consume web services inside your .Net application, a tool exist to help you create the .Net code to interact with web services. This tool is a console application called "ScvUtil.exe".

You can find in this blog post the information concerning the location of this tool.

This application generate two files. The first file is a .cs file that contains the code of the proxy and the code of the DTO classes (complex class used by the service). The second file is a .config file that contains the information about how to connect to the web services.

To generate those files, you can simply call the ScvUtil application with the path of the webservice (the WSDL path). This is an URL.

 svcutil.exe http://localhost:1234/MyService.svc?wsdl 

The problem is that doing it with only a single parameter will output those file to your C:\\windows\\system32\\ which is not clean and can cause security problem. However, it's possible to tell where to output those two files but adding 2 parameters to the svcutil.exe tools.

 svcutil.exe http://localhost:1234/MyService.svc?wsdl /out:"c:\\myPath\\proxy.cs" /config:"c:\\myPath\\config.config" 

Explicit destinations give you the leverage to output the CS file and the configuration file where you want.