Beginning InfoPath™ 2003

Chapter 15. Creating and Working with Web Services

Web services, sometimes called XML Web services, have been mentioned several times in this book. Web services are fast becoming a very popular technology and are surprisingly easy to use and create. Once created, you can expose the Web service to either your intranet or the Internet. If the Web service is exposed to the Internet, other applications can access it regardless of if they are desktop—or Web browser—based. They can be used (known as being consumed) using standard Internet protocols.

Along with databases, such as Access and SQL Server, and XML documents and schemas, you can use a Web service for InfoPath data sources. You may ask why you would bother if you can just hook into the database just mentioned, but there are a number of other databases that you may want to connect to over the Internet, and Web services are the way to accomplish that. In this chapter you will:

• Be introduced to Web services and the technologies behind them.

• Get an overview of ASP.NET.

• See how to create a Web service.

• Create a Web service and use it as a data source for an InfoPath form.

For the purposes of installing and testing the Web service provided in this chapter, you must have Internet Information Services 5.x installed and ASP.NET 1.1 loaded for the local host. When creating the sample Web service in the chapter, you will use Visual Studio .NET 2003 with C#.