C#® Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET

Consuming Web Services

Now that we have created several XML Web services, let's take a look at how to consume them. As mentioned earlier, XML Web services can be consumed by any client that is capable of making a request over HTTP and parsing out the returned XML. The .NET framework is capable of working in this fashion, but it also has tools for creating something called a Web service proxy that greatly simplifies access to a Web service. You can create a Web service proxy in two ways. If you are using Visual Studio .NET, you can add what is called a Web Reference by pointing Visual Studio .NET to the URL of the Web service. If you are not using Visual Studio .NET, you can use a tool called Web Service Description Language Tool (wsdl.exe) to ...