Hi,
I agree that adding the service reference is not all that's needed. In my case I needed to include the "ServiceLayer.cs" file from Maria Trinidad's sample project, that has a lot of logic built in. You probably haven't done that and that's why the code snippets don't work. Duncan's code snippet for example only calls a function from that file instead of properly showing how to send the request yourself.
I don't think that we should have to use Maria Trinidad's file, but it works almost out of the box and in our case we didn't have the time to build a more flexible framework for communicating with the service layer. Amongst other things it requires use of json.net while the newer .net frameworks already include json serializers that we use extensively for web-based communications in our projects.
Hope that info helps...
Best regards,
Joerg.