Background:
I am building a Windows enterprise application that has separate assemblies
for UI, business logic/rules, and data access (i.e. typical N-tier
architecture). Many of the assemblies reference a "name and address web
service," which gives me validation lists for name honorifics (e.g. Dr, Mr,
Miss, Mrs), name suffixes (e.g. Sr, Jr, III), and City/State/ZIP combos. The
same "name and address web service" also can save and retrieve addresses.
Obviously, it's a pretty generic little web service that gets used in
multiple places in the app (return addresses for mailings; contact info for
A/R accounts; and more). Multiple assemblies have need to use the web service.

The Problem:
If each assembly has a reference to the same web service and names the proxy
the same thing (i.e. NameAndAddressWebService), then I start getting
ambiguous reference errors popping up everywhere. If I name all the web
references differently, then I'm okay. But I have to be careful that all my
references really have different names, even those "built into" other
assemblies developed by other programmers. Some options:
1) Why can't web references be marked "Private" or "Friend" so their
visibility is restricted to the assembly that they're declared in? The
VS2005-generated code always generates "Public" proxy objects. (I can go into
the Reference.vb and change everything from Public to Friend, but that seems
like a really dangerous thing to do; "Update Web Reference" wipes out all
these manual override changes.)
2) I can create a wrapper assembly that essentially just has the web
reference proxy objects in it (i.e. NameAndAddressWSProxy.dll). I can then
reference this assembly from all my other assemblies and everything works.
But wrapping a web service seems hokey.
3) I could scrap the whole name and address web service and just turn it
into a standard Windows assembly (Windows Class Library). At this point, I'm
just not seeing the advantage of having this functionality in a web service
(heresy, I know!).

I've been looking for some best practices, or at least "here's-what-we-did",
articles, but I haven't found anything yet. Recommendations?

Archived from group: microsoft>public>vb>enterprise