Ever since the debacle described in this blog post, I’ve made it a point to double-check the WSDL on the SOAP web services for our main product, any time I’m doing a non-trivial rollout, even if I know I haven’t changed anything that should affect the WSDL.
Up until today, I’ve always just done it by bringing up the WSDL URL for each web service in Firefox, and saving it to a text file. There’s only a half-dozen web services, so it doesn’t take that long. But this morning I finally broke down and wrote a batch file to fetch them all, using cURL.
I’ve gotten a bit more enthusiastic about using cURL, and other tools, to simplify things for me recently, since reading this blog post by Scott Hanselman.