There was an error downloading metadata from the address

I am trying to add service reference.

this is the error which is being displayed again and again?

Please help

There are atleast 4 possibilities:

The metadata exchange mex endpoint is not defined
metadata exchange is not enabled
You are using the wrong address
You are being blocked by some security setting

Try the url in a browser to see that it returns a wsdl

You may also just need to build / rebuild the project.

It was happening the same to me and I found that I've had forgotten to add the "Service Contract" and the "Operation Contract" annotations on the interface of my WCF service

Just try to Build the project without any error and give service reference again.

In Web.config file I changed :

 <endpoint address="" binding="pollingDuplexHttpBinding"
    contract="IAsyncTaskService"/>

to this :

<endpoint address="" binding="pollingDuplexHttpBinding"
    contract="DuplexService.Web.IAsyncTaskService"/>

and error was removed. Zeni

Try rebuilding the project first, if that does not fix it, try changing the property httpGetEnabled from FALSE to TRUE in your web.config.

  <serviceBehaviors>
    <behavior name="serviceBehavior">
      <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
      <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>
    </behavior>
  </serviceBehaviors>

Another possibility in this situation is that there is no endpoint listening. I.e., the service you are trying to add isn't "up". I made this mistake when trying to add a reference to a WCF service I was working on, but I forgot to Open it.

Check IIS is serving the service URL. In my case, I had changed my Windows password, but had forgotten that these credentials were being used by IIS in both the application and the app pool.

I had an issue like this one : Adding a service reference failed with a message "Method not allowed".

The wsdl worked fine in my browser..

The reason was that I configured the endpoint to listen on http://0.0.0.0:6000/mex, which the "Add Service Reference" tool doesn't seem to like. Changing it to a real IP address made it work (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:6000/mex)

I know this is an oldie, but I thought I would add what worked for me so that I can find it again down the road ;)

In my case, the AppPool user didn't have access the %Windir%\temp, which apparently is necessary in order for the MEX data to be generated.

Shout out to Amy Peng in this thread for her tip!

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10618181/there-was-an-error-downloading-metadata-from-the-address

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wcf

service-reference