Chapter 10: Developing Service-Oriented Applications for SharePoint 2010
What You’ll Learn In This Chapter:
- Using Web services that are native to SharePoint
- Building custom Web services, including ASP.NET, WCF, REST, and Azure services
- Implementing custom Web services using different client solutions in SharePoint 2010
One of the key innovations in the software industry over the past few years has been the growing use of Web services to integrate systems. One of the key undercurrents of this book is that SharePoint 2010 is a platform, and, since it is a platform, it is imperative that you be able to interoperate with Web services.
This chapter is not the first time you’re seeing the use of services. For example, in Chapter 5, you saw how to use Web services to interact with a SharePoint list, and, in Chapter 8, you saw BCS solutions that leveraged Web services. However, this chapter is a concerted look at both native and custom Web services, and how you can develop custom solutions that integrate with SharePoint.
Web services enable you to develop applications that can expose or reach out to systems or application programming interfaces (APIs) mediated either by a network or by the Internet. One of the primary benefits of Web services is that they can bridge heterogeneous systems — those systems that, without these services, might exist in isolation. The Web services can be restricted to an enterprise network (for example, multiple applications accessing an Expenses Web service ...
