WCF Viewer

WCF Viewer is a static analysis tool designed for developers, architects, and QA teams working with Windows Communication Foundation services. It builds a structured model of services, their contracts, available bindings, and endpoints by inspecting code and configuration files. The goal is to expose what is defined, what is exposed externally, and where metadata is available, enabling early risk assessment and governance before runtime.

Conceptually, the tool parses C# or VB.NET sources to collect ServiceContract and DataContract types, reads app.config and web.config to enumerate endpoints and bindings, and checks for the presence of metadata exchange (mex) endpoints. It links contracts to operations, validates binding compatibility, and flags mismatches between client proxies and service definitions.

Audience members include software architects evaluating service boundaries, developers migrating from older bindings, QA engineers validating integration points, and release engineers ensuring configuration correctness. Use cases include auditing a solution for contract drift, identifying deprecated bindings, and providing a consistent basis for client code generation or contract testing.

Unique value lies in producing a machine-consumable model plus human-readable summaries that support downstream validation pipelines. Core features include automatic extraction of services, contracts, operations, bindings, endpoints, mex status, and exportable reports; optional analyses cover drift detection, compatibility scoring, and export to JSON or CSV.