Building the C# vSphere DLLs

In the vSphere Web Services SDK, VMware supplies sample vSphere clients for Visual Studio 2008. The SDK includes a project (.csproj) file for each sample, and a solution (.sln) file for the whole set of samples. The project files reference the DLLs through which a client communicates with the Web service.

XML Serializers

For best performance, precompile the XML serializers to a separate DLL. If you precompile the XML serializers and modify the class declaration to use the precompiled serializer DLL, the SDK samples require a shorter initialization time when they instantiate the VimService class.

See the MSDN documentation for more details about XML serialization and startup performance.

Build the C# vSphere DLLs

Before you can run the SDK samples, you must build the DLLs that provide common services to the samples.

Prerequisites for Building the C# vSphere DLLs

■	Install a C# development environment, as described in Setting Up for C# Development.

■	Open a Visual Studio command shell window and set environment variables as described in Set Environment Variables To Build C# DLLs and Samples.

For an example of how to script this procedure using a Windows batch file, see Scripting the C# DLL Build.

To build the C# vSphere DLLs

1	Open a Visual Studio Tools command shell.

2	Navigate to the .NET subdirectory for vSphere client samples.

cd %WS_SDK_HOME%\vsphere-ws\dotnet\cs\samples

3	Generate the VimService.cs file from the WSDL, using the following command syntax with the WSE WSDL tool:

wsewsdl3.exe /n:Vim25Api /type:webClient /l:CS %WSDLHOME%\vim.wsdl %WSDLHOME%\vimService.wsdl

This command generates VimService.cs, the default output file, in the current directory, using the Vim25Api namespace.

4	Compile VimService.cs to a library, using the following command syntax:

csc /t:library /out:Vim25Service.dll /r:"%WSE_HOME%\Microsoft.Web.Services3.dll" VimService.cs

This command generates a serializer assembly, a DLL.

5	Use the sgen tool to pregenerate and compile the XML serializers, using the following command syntax:

sgen /p Vim25Service.dll

This command outputs the Vim25Service.XmlSerializers.dll file in the current directory. This DLL file contains pregenerated XML serializer code.

6	Using a source code editor, find occurrences of the following string in the VimService.cs file that you generated in Step 3.

[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute

Replace occurrences of the string with

// [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute

This will prevent .NET from processing the Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute attributes that are the main cause of the slow instantiation of the Vim25Service class.

7	Annotate the VimService class in the VimService.cs file that you generated in Step 3, adding this XmlSerializerAssemblyAttribute to point to the location of the XML serializer assembly:

[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializerAssemblyAttribute(AssemblyName = "Vim25Service.XmlSerializers")]

The result should look something like the following example:

// ... Some code here ...

[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializerAssemblyAttribute(AssemblyName = "Vim25Service.XmlSerializers")]

public partial class VimService : Microsoft.Web.Services3.WebServicesClientProtocol {

// ... More code here.

8	Save the modified VimService.cs file.

9	Regenerate the Vim25Service.dll library with the following command syntax:

csc /t:library /out:Vim25Service.dll /r:"%WSE_HOME%\Microsoft.Web.Services3.dll" VimService.cs

10	Copy the generated files Vim25Service.dll and Vim25Service.XmlSerializers.dll to the %SDK_HOME%\vsphere-ws\dotnet\cs\samples\lib directory.

copy Vim25Service*.dll lib