What does this WCF error mean: “Custom tool warning: Cannot import wsdl:portType”

Question

I created a WCF service library project in my solution, and have service references to this. I use the services from a class library, so I have references from my WPF applic

Answer 1

For anyone here in the future, I had the same error but caused by version issues, in two different ways.

I have two WCF services and two client applications that talk via the service references. I updated a nuget package on both sides and tried to update the service reference and got this error.

Deleting didn't help. Unchecking "reuse assemblies" is not desired as I need to reuse them - that's the whole point.

In the end, there were two separate issues:

1) The first issue, I believe, was a visual studio caching issue. I meticulously went over all of the references and found no issues but it still reported being unable to find the previous version of the file. I uninstalled all of the nuget packages, restarted visual studio, and reinstalled them. Updating the service reference worked.

2) The second issue was caused by a dependency issue. I updated the nuget package on both sides and everything appeared correct, but an unmarked dependency was out of sync. Example:

Package Foo v1 references Bar v1. It is possible to update Foo and Bar to v2 independently without updating the reference. If you install both Foo and Bar v2 the service reference tool will scan Foo v2, see the reference to Bar v1, and fail because it can't find the older version. This is only reported correctly if you update the version numbers of your dll for every package. Visual Studio and MSBuild will have no problem building the application but the service reference will have a terrible time trying to resolve everything.

I hope this helps someone.

Answer 2

I also had this issue Today. It took me one entire day to find my mistake. Hope it helps.

My class that weren't able to be imported has a cutom enum type property. This property is marked as DataMember and the Enum is also marked as DataContract. Everything fine so far. I just forgot to mark every enum member as EnumMember.

So i changed

[DataContract]
public enum SortMethodType
{
    Default = 0,
    Popularity = 1,
    ReleaseDate = 2,
    PublishedDate = 3,
    TranslatedTitle = 4,
    OriginalTitle = 5,
    UserRating = 6,
    Duration = 7
}

To this:

[DataContract]
public enum SortMethodType
{
    [EnumMember]
    Default = 0,
    [EnumMember]
    Popularity = 1,
    [EnumMember]
    ReleaseDate = 2,
    [EnumMember]
    PublishedDate = 3,
    [EnumMember]
    TranslatedTitle = 4,
    [EnumMember]
    OriginalTitle = 5,
    [EnumMember]
    UserRating = 6,
    [EnumMember]
    Duration = 7
}

And it finally worked!

Answer 3

I was looking over my project and I was having this same issue. It turned out to be different versions of the same DLL on the WCF vs. Web Site. Web site had a newer version of the DLL and the service was referencing an older version of the DLL. Once they were all in sync all worked well.

Answer 4

If in doubt that your service doesn't have any problems (such as problems with enums, or non-serializable classes as mentioned by others) then try to create a new project with a new reference.

I am using Silverlight 5 and I had tried to delete and recreate the reference several times. The reference.cs file just came up completely empty each time and it had been literally years since I'd created it so trying to figure out what had changed in the service was out of the question.

I noticed that the error contained references to 2.0.5.0. Now I don't even know if this is actually relevant to the Silverlight version, but it made me think of just creating a brand new project and then suddenly everything worked.

Warning 2 Custom tool warning: Cannot import wsdl:portType Detail: An exception was thrown while running a WSDL import extension: System.ServiceModel.Description.DataContractSerializerMessageContractImporter Error: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Xml, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7cec85d7bea7798e' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. XPath to Error Source: //wsdl:definitions[@targetNamespace='']/wsdl:port Type[@name='IShoppingCart']

Answer 5

I experienced the same error. I struggled for almost a day trying to find out what was going wrong. The clue for me were the warnings that VS was throwing. It was trying to do some kind of mapping to Yahoo.Yui.Compressor.dll, a library I had added and removed (because I decided not to use it) a couple of days before. It was shocking because the library wasn't there, but somehow it was trying to reference it.

Finally, I restore this dll from the Trash, and then I could update my service reference successfully.

Answer 6

I constantly run across this error while it works on another developers machine. Even though I'm a full admin everywhere in my virtual machine, I tried closing Visual Studio, and re-opening with 'Run As Administrator' and it magically worked.

Good luck.