.NET Web Services Deserialization: Issues and Workarounds

I ran into the following problem:

A 3rd-party web service was given to me to be added into one .NET project I am working with.
Upon doing so, the reference.cs that is generated after adding a Service Reference into a Visual Studio project - was empty. In other words - no code was rendered that "translated" the web service definition language (wsdl) into .NET (in my case, C#) understandable code. No types to instance to make use of the service.

In a short, I researched for the topic, and found out that the Add Service Reference into a Visual Studio project action will, behind the scenes, try to deserialize the wsdl xml into C# code. In case there are problems and the process fails somehow (and a good way to know that is running the framework command tool SvcUtil.exe), a solution might be trying the deserialization in a different way.

As far as I understood (all what I am writing here is from googling, I did not check things for myself on code), the default .NET wsdl deserialization is used via the DataContractSerializer. There is a way, however, to use a different serializer the framework also offers - XmlSerializer.

To manually deserialize the wsdl into a .NET class, you can use another framework command tool: wsdl.exe.

This is what worked for me - the .cs file generated in this step was ok (not empty). I added it to my project tree and instanced the type, and was finally using the web service.

Interesting stuff on svcutil.exe can be found here.
Googling for wsdl.exe and svcutil.exe is fundamental.
For more on their difference, click here.