The development of uComponents for Umbraco is still ongoing but is probably close to a v1.0 release. During the development of the Multi-node tree picker data type, I’ve spotted a bug in the Umbraco core in regards to the ASMX web service the existing tree uses to render out it’s initial node. The bug basically won’t allow the tree to render an individual tree, only a full app. Since the Multi-node tree picker requires rendering of an individual tree, i needed to fix this. To do this was a bit of a work around but i had to override the tree’s ASMX web service with my own (I’ll write a post about this one later). It then occurred to me that I’ve never embedded an ASMX web service into a DLL without a physical file and I didn’t want to go updating the web.config with custom handlers, etc… So I came up with a way to embed ASMX web services in your DLL without modifying web.config’s, etc… here’s how:

First, create your web service as a standard class and add all of the functionality that your require your web service to have:

In your class library project, create a new text file but give it the extension .asmx:

Set the file to be a non compiled file:

Create an resource file:

Double click on your new RESX file, then drag your ASMX file into the editor to add the file as a property of your RESX file:

Double click your ASMX file to edit it and set it to inherit from your custom web service class:

Now, we need to register this ASMX web service into the web application that it’s being deployed to. This is easily done by just checking if the ASMX file exists where it needs to be before it needs to be called and if it doesn’t, we just create the file. In the case of uComponents and the multi-node tree picker requires the ASMX web service for the CustomTreeControl, so we’ll do this check in the CustomTreeControl’s static constructor:

public CustomTreeControl()
{
    var filePath = HttpContext.Current
                    .Server.MapPath("~/CustomTreeService.asmx");
            
    //check if it exists
    if (!File.Exists(filePath))
    {
        //lock the thread
        lock (m_Locker)
        {
            //double check locking....
            if (!File.Exists(filePath))
            {
                //now create our new local web service
                using (var sw = new StreamWriter(File.Create(filePath)))
                {
                    //write the contents of our embedded resource to the file
                    sw.Write(CustomTreeServiceResource.CustomTreeService);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

That’s it!