WSSWebServicePackager tool – Deploy Custom Web Services in Sharepoint

I had already slogged through the publishing of my own web services in Sharepoint a few times, as directed by The Horses Mouth. It’s not pretty, and it’s not fun. Takes about 20 minutes to half an hour, could be faster if you really know how to do it, I guess I’m just put off by all the careful quoting and whatnot.

Anyway, no matter what they tell you XML is not meant to be a human readable format! So it just so happens there is a tool that makes my life a whole bunch simpler. Without further ado, I’ll just give you the link. Go check it out. (It has a gui, so don’t worry about where the command line parameters reference is.)

NOTE: There is an OLDER version of this tool by another author on CodeProject — this is NOT that tool, this one is meant for WSS 3 (.net 2.0), the CodeProject one is for WSS 2 (.net 1.1).
It says that there is a requirement to place the file in the same directory as Disco.exe, so, using Visual Studio 2008 you can either copy the disco.exe from the Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin to another folder where you put the WSSWebServicePackager.exe. OR you can just dump the WSSWebServicePackager.exe into the Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin folder and it’ll be in your path automatically when you do a Visual Studio Command Prompt.

Make sure you save the files into the Layouts directory under your 12 hive (I mean specify the layouts directory when you’re running the tool as the output directory.) After you’re done with that you’ll have to copy them to the ISAPI directory, and edit the xml file so it can be discovered as if it were a regular old sharepoint web service. (This tool makes it so you don’t have to do all the steps in the first link I posted, but YOU STILL HAVE TO READ IT. There are some things that you won’t get except from that document, and unless you’re able to assume knowledge directly, well.. just go here and make sure you covered everything.