Changing asp.net web service namespace after deployed

By some unfortunate events we published a web service with the tempuri-namespace a couple of months ago and no one noticed (not in our company, not the companies connecting to the web service) even though it's live since that time and lots of companies (~25 i guess) already access this web service.

Now I'm thinking of correcting that mistake and have the namespace fixed to a proper value. The only problem is that as soon as we would do it, all the programs and services connected to this web service would stop working. I can't really allow that to happen.

Is there any way to fix the namespace for future pu开发者_C百科rpose or to have the web service operate under two namespaces as one web service?

What can I do to get rid of the tempuri-namespace and have it fixed without needing to synchronize the change with all the external companies?

I'm all out of ideas, so any help would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Are you sure that everything using the webservice will stop working, most things i have seen wouldn't even care if the namespace changed. i.e. if you create a web reference or use the WSD tool in visual studio to consume a web service it will not break if the XML namespace changes on the web service. It does not use that in the C# namespace at all.

Can you wait until you next release your set of Web Services? At this point they would need to recompile with the new WSDL anyways.