Paul

The first thing to remember is that your proxy class (i.e. what you've
called the consumed webservice code-behind file) is generated from your
service's WSDL and not directly from your C# class.  When you create
your web reference, your proxy class is generated from the WSDL's XML
and is therefore limited to what is defined in that XML. If you look at
the WSDL you will see that there is no reference to class properties,
gets, sets etc.

The second thing to remember is that when you make your web service
call, you are not actually marshalling up actual instance of your class
and sending it across the wire back you client. What you are doing is
serializing your class into XML and sending that XML back to your
client. What you are getting on the client side is an XML snapshot of
your customer class as it exists at the time of service call.  Because
you are only getting a snapshot, you don't get any of the methods in
the class or any else in the way of functionality. You are only able to
access the properties in the class via the public variables.

In order to have full access to class method, propeties etc, what I
would recommend doing is creating your customer class in a separate
project that you will reference from both your web service and your
client application. By doing that, both projects will have full access
to your class, its methods, its overridable properties etc.

Next,  create (in the client project) the new superclass that will
inherit from your base customer class.

Next, create the web reference from your client to your service. In
your auto-generated proxy class, manually change any references to the
base customer class (which will be defined further on in your proxy
class) with a reference to the new superclass you just created.

At that point, you will be able to retrieve a fully functionaly class
from your proxy that will have your methods, properties etc in it.

Hopefully that wasn't too confusing. If it was, let me know and I will
post back some code examples from a sample project I have.

Hope that helps,

Peter Kelcey