Microsoft apparently didn’t re-sign all the tools in the SDK supplied with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008. This is actually documented in the readme that UISpy has this issue, which of course, I didn’t read..

SVCUtil.exe also has this problem and it causes any proxy-generation from VS.NET 2008 to fail (as well as killing the client tester process which is spawned for WCF testing). You’ll know you’ve hit this error when the program crashes with a System.IO.FileException and indicates that it has failed strong-name validation.

It’s easy enough to fix ..

  1. Open a command prompt with full admin rights
  2. Change to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\V6.0a\bin directory
  3. Execute SN -Vr svcutil.exe

This turns off strong-name validation for svcutil.exe and allows it to function properly.