WCF - "The client was unable to retrieve service metadata. Make sure the service is running and exposing metadata."

So as you can see, not I have moved onto writing code in framework 3.5 and learning the way around WCF, WPF etc ..

I am in the processes of designing and developing a application using SOA and for that purpose, trying to create the data layer as service. Now why this is been planned has a service has its own reasons and maybe I can explain it sometime later. After creating a simple WCF service, I tried to test it using the default client tool provided by VS2008, I kept getting this error "The client was unable to retrieve service metadata. Make sure the service is running and exposing metadata."

I looked and cross-checked every detail and could not locate the issue. After a couple of trial and error, I noticed that one of the contract defined for the endpoint did not have the complete namespace. I had changed the namespace of contract class and I think I had reassigned the contract using the WCF configuration tool and suprisongly, it had not added the complete namespace. Anyway, correcting this namespace cleared the issue.

So you get a similar error, check the namespace for each of the component within the app.config by opening it within the VS IDE and not within the WCF configuration tool.