Re-using a thirdy party web service using WCF

I have a 3rd party web service, which I intend to use from 2 different applications:

1. a Windows Workflow (WF) project
2. a website

Right now, from these 2 apps I manually add the reference to the 3rd party web service & call the required method. This means I have this proxy layer generated in 2 places.

What am looking for is a way to creat开发者_JS百科e (am not sure about the correct word to use, sorry guys) the 3rd party web service in one place & have the 2 applications re-use it.

Can this be achieved using WCF, something like wrapping the 3rd party web service in WCF.

Is this approach right?any help or pointers would be a great help, haven't done much service based development.

Environment: The website, the WF project resides on 2 different servers (windows 2003 R2).

Environment(development): windows 7 enterprise/vs 2010 / c#

Thanks

More detail:

Think I dint use the right words in my first query, the following is what am looking for & why I need it that way,I need to call the 3rd party web service from a new WCF service.This new WCF service will be called from other applications(winforms/WF/website) instead of calling the 3rd party service.The idea is to able to switch the 3rd party service(vendore) without changing the implementation & in one place.We use an hr-xml format for request/response & all our vendors(exisiting or future) support the hr-xml format for the industry we are in.If we use a class library, then to change vendor, we should recompile & distribute the dll correct,we dont want to do that. I am not sure about an architecture to be followed to achieve this whole functionaity.Any pointers in the right direction would be a great help.

Thanks

Your quest makes great sense indeed - and I think it should be quite easy to accomplish:

• create a new class library assembly ("WebServiceClient" or whatever you want to call it)
• inside that new project, do you Add Service Reference - this will create the necessary WCF proxy classes and the config file
• compile that class library

From both your apps, you should be able to reference that web service client assembly, and use it - you have the code for the client side proxy only inside that common assembly, but you can use it from any number of apps.

One point to remember: you will need to copy&paste the config for the web service to the main application's config (app.config for a Winforms/console app, web.config for a website/web app) since it cannot be read directly from a class library's config file (that won't be used by .NET).

In this case, I think, WCF service will be the gr8 idea. You dont want to recombile the client applications if the vendor is changed.