Whew, I finally got around to updating
tutorial 2 in the WCF series. Part of the delay was just that I've been trying to get through a whole variety of things lately, but part of it was also that I've made a lot of conceptual changes, covering Serializable as well as
xml serialization and formatting options and contrasting these with
Datacontracts, while still trying to keep things at a good introductory level. Hopefully these goals were achieved :-).
[Update: with Visual Studio 2008 there is now a setting in the IDE to do this. Check out this post for more]
I posted a solution a little while ago to have an existing .net Web Service client proxy return a List (or similar) using a RegEx replacement. In the post I got a comment pointing me at a post by Steve Eichert on using the svcutil command-line option tool to do this in WCF.
From the post, there is a "/rct" switch which allows you to specify the collection type to be used. The svcutil command-line help describes this as:
"/collectionType:<type> - A fully-qualified or assembly-qualified name of the type to use as a collection data type when code is generated from schemas. (Short Form: /ct)"
The short form seems different, but perhaps this is just an update. It is a pity these options are not included in the Visual Studio wizards though, as there are a number of useful command-line switches available with svcutil.exe.