Creating and Consuming Web Services in Visual Basic®

Using the SOAP Toolkit on the Server

In this section, we will recreate the example server shown in Chapter 1. This will involve a bit more work than what we saw to build the example using ASP.NET. The SOAP Toolkit does not know how to serialize or deserialize properties contained in an object. Instead, you need to handle this transformation yourself. For passing arrays of complex types, you will need to handle the complete transformation yourself. We will look at this in detail. If you pass simple data back and forth, things are quite a bit easier.

The code to handle the first three functions (HelloWorld, GetRandomNumbers, and GetPerson) is pretty basic, and is shown in Listing 10.1. The infrastructure included with the SOAP Toolkit handles these ...