How can I dynamically switch web service addresses in .NET without a recompile?

I've struggled with this issue for a few days and finally the light bulb clicked. The KEY to being able to change the URL of a webservice at runtime is overriding the constructor, which I did with a partial class declaration. The above, setting the URL behavior to Dynamic must also be done.

This basically creates a web-service wrapper where if you have to reload web service at some point, via add service reference, you don't loose your work. The Microsoft help for Partial classes specially states that part of the reason for this construct is to create web service wrappers. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wa80x488(v=vs.100).aspx

// Web Service Wrapper to override constructor to use custom ConfigSection 
// app.config values for URL/User/Pass
namespace myprogram.webservice
{
    public partial class MyWebService
    {
        public MyWebService(string szURL)
        {
            this.Url = szURL;
            if ((this.IsLocalFileSystemWebService(this.Url) == true))
            {
                this.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
                this.useDefaultCredentialsSetExplicitly = false;
            }
            else
            {
                this.useDefaultCredentialsSetExplicitly = true;
            }
        }
    }
}

If you are fetching the URL from a database you can manually assign it to the web service proxy class URL property. This should be done before calling the web method.

If you would like to use the config file, you can set the proxy classes URL behavior to dynamic.