Creating and Consuming Web Services in Visual Basic®

Adding Web Service Support to COM+ Applications

Existing COM+ applications can be easily converted into a Web Service if they have a stateless interface and if they only use simple types, such as dates, numbers of any form, strings, and arrays of these types. If you transmit byte arrays, the existing tools will even encode them as base64 data. Overall, the base64 encoding bloats the content by 30 percent but conserves on space, because each byte in the array will not have a separate tag, such as <byte>value</byte>. Contrast this with passing arrays of any other numeric type that does have some XML surrounding each value.

NOTE

base64 encoding was developed for e-mail to handle attachments. The data is encoded to guarantee that the data can travel ...