Usually I use WCF just by referencing the contracts directly and using my own generic helper methods. Unfortunately, I had to make use of the built-in async patterns that the codegen can provide. Hence, I ended up using the "Add Service Reference" dialog, which notices (unlike svcutil on the command line) that since I'm requesting async, it'll need to generate my interfaces even though they're already referenced. Maybe in .NET 4 we'll have a new async pattern that'll leverage Expression Trees to rid us of having to use the rather ugly FooAsync/BeingFoo patterns.

Things were working just fine until I added a reference to a new service. Adding the service reference didn't work; it failed silently. It added all the schema files to the project, but the Reference.cs file was empty. If I told it to NOT used referenced assemblies, then it generated everything just fine.

After switching to the command line and using svcutil, I got these errors:
Error: Cannot import wsdl:portType
Detail: An exception was thrown while running a WSDL import extension: System.ServiceModel.Description.DataContractSerializerMessageContractImporter
Error: Referenced type 'MyApp.Management.CoolFunction.CoolThingRule, MyApp.Management.Contracts, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' with data contract name 'CoolThingRule' in namespace 'http://schemas.MyApp.com/management/v2/00' cannot be used since it does not match imported DataContract. Need to exclude this type from referenced types.XPath to Error Source: //wsdl:definitions[@targetNamespace='http://schemas.MyApp.com/management/v2/00']/wsdl:portType[@name='ICoolThingManagement']

I regenerated without the referenced code and figured out that the problem was that one type referenced an enum which had some values without the [EnumMember] attribute (although it had a DataContractAttribute on the enum itself). Because of this, WCF wanted to represent the enum with a string and thus was incompatible. Adding the EnumMemberAttribute to all the values sorted out this issue.