.NET Framework Developer's Guide 
Web Services Discovery 

Given the URL to a discovery document residing on a Web server, a developer of a client application can learn that a Web service exists, what its capabilities are, and how to properly interact with it. This process is known as Web service discovery.

Through the process of Web service discovery, a set of files is downloaded to the local computer containing details about the existence of Web services. The files can be service descriptions, XSD schemas, or discovery documents. Using the Wsdl.exe tool, you can create a proxy class to the Web service described by a service description or XSD schema. For details about creating a proxy class, see Creating an XML Web Service Proxy. A downloaded discovery document contains information about the existence of other Web services that might reside on a different Web server. For details about the contents of a discovery document, see How to: Enable Discovery for XML Web Services.

You can use the Web Services Discovery tool (Disco.exe) from a command prompt to perform Web service discovery on a URL.

Disco /out:location /username:user /password:mypwd /domain:mydomain http://www.contoso.com/my.disco
NoteNote

The arguments listed are the commonly used arguments for Disco.exe. For the full syntax of Disco.exe, see Web Services Discovery Tool (Disco.exe).

Parameter Value

http://www.contoso.com/my.disco

The URL to enact the discovery process on.

/out:location

The location to create the file containing the discovery results. The default value is the current directory. (Optional)

/username:user

The user name to use when connecting to a Web server that requires authentication. (Optional)

/password:mypwd

The password to use when connecting to a Web server that requires authentication. (Optional)

/domain:mydomain

The domain to use when connecting to a Web server that requires authentication. (Optional)

Referenced to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f9t5yf68.aspx