Hi All,

Does anyone have an views on web service versioning? I am trying to decide upon a web service versioning strategy and at the moment have come up with there is basically no such thing as versioning a web service and to make the service backward compatible you basically have to generate a new web service and point your new clients to that one and keep supporting the existing one untill you move all those clients over.

Any ideas??

Rob

That's it from the way I see it. In order to keep your web service backward compatible you just have to make sure that you don't break the interfaces to it (i.e. don't change the web method signatures).

It almost sounds like you are also talking about moving a web service to a different location (different address). Is this correct? In that case then backward compatibility means keeping the old address available as you said.

-Peter

Hi Peter,

Well what i have found is there are two types of changes that can occour, minor and major. Minor changes allow you to carry on and not break the client, so updates to namespace etc are not really required as the client should still work, you could infact for instance if you have a new method you want to add, specify that in a different namespace, but i wont go into that. The major updates however will almost certain to break the client, and this is when a new end point for new clients would be introduced. From what i have read this is probably all that can be done. Not sure if anyone agrees or not, would be good to have some feedback.

Rob