Hello NG.

I've got a little problem with sharing types between webservices and
clients.

I've created a business class with public fields within a shared assembly
like:

public class Item
{
   public System.Guid UID
   public System.String Displayname
   public DateTime LastChanged
}

A corresponding webservice use this class and returns it.

[WebMethod()]
public Item GetItem()
{
   Item i = new Item();
   i.UID = Guid.NewGuid();
   i.Displayname = "New Item";
   i.LastChanged = DateTime.Now;
   return i;
}

I've also created a client application that consumes this webservice.
Webservice and client are sharing the same assembly which contains the class
"Item". Now I want to get the Item-object from the proxy, but because the
proxy generator creates his own class definition of "Item" out of the
wsdl-file, I cannot cast the webservice method return value to the business
object.

DataServices.ItemService service = new DataServices.ItemService();
Item i = service.Getitem();

I've made some research on this problem and discovered, that there is only
one way to manage this by editing the proxy-generated file "reference.cs".
This have to be done every time the webservice is changing. But there was
something wired about that.

If I'm returning a DataSet object or a XmlNode or XmlDocument, I get the
right type back, why is that so? I've checked if they have implemented some
interfaces on these classes, but that's not the case.

My question now is: Is there any way to make my own classes behaving like
XmlNode or XmlDocument? Maybe an attribute? Or Interface?

I'm currently using NET v1.1 and VS2003.

-Martin