Applied SOAP: Implementing .NET XML Web Services

Controlling the SOAP Serialization Format

You have other tools that you can use to modify the SOAP wire representation. .NET provides you these so that you can customize the SOAP for any number of reasons, the most important of which is for interoperability. The Web Service world is finding that standards are generally solidifying, but some things are still in flux. Sometimes you might need to tailor SOAP to fit a certain mold, such as when you want to create a Web Service that meets preexisting WSDL. Other times, you might want to create SOAP that specific existing clients expect, perhaps to minimize .NET migration side effects.

A couple of primary mechanisms exist for modifying the SOAP stream. For example, you might add the SoapMethodAttribute ...