Adding methods to the webservice: do old clients need to update web references?

Question

ProductA uses our only web service, which is a separate deployment from ProductA. We deploy both to production.

Later, we\'re writing ProductB. During that effort,

Answer 1

While I agree that there probably won't be any problem by not updating the service references of existing clients, you should also ask what problems there will be if you do update the service references of existing clients. Be sure to test that scenario as well.

Although we tend to think about adding method to the service as something that's only important on the server, keep in mind that when a service reference is updated, this is actually changing the code of the client.

Some organizations believe in testing client code when the client code changes.