Web Service and Versioning support

[talahaski]

Can anybody point me to any good sites, reference material, or provide me with information on how to handle supporting multiple versions.

Here is a bit more information.

We have an application at version 2.0. We have built a web service interface along with a wsdl file. Up to this point, we have been the only users of these web service methods, but we now have other companies that are doing work for us using our web service methods.

We are in the process of making some major changes that will include core object changes, along with new web service methods and a new wsdl file. When we rollout, we cannot expect these other companies to be able to immediatly change thier applications to use our version 3.0 methods. So we need to be able to support both the current 2.0 and the new 3.0 methods in the same application.

I don't want to run 2 different versions on different servers, but instead build my application in such a way that it will accept the v3.0 wsdl along with the v2.0 wsdl. If a v2.0 object is recieved. it would then convert it to the v3 object and process it.

I know there are many different ways to handle this, but I would like to read up on it beforehand.


I tried googling, but just got hundreds of links of crap.

 

[Diesel]

You can try Microsoft Updater Application Block

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

Are you planning on modifying existing functionality or just adding new functionality to the web service? If you are adding functionality but leaving the existing methods alone then existing clients will continue to work just fine.
If you are modifying functionality then things can get tricky - one way is to overload the WebMethod and use the MessageName parameter to the WebMethod attribute to specify different names in the wsdl.