Inside ASP.NET

Using the SOAP Toolkit with XML Web Services

You’ve already seen how you can use SOAP to get data into and out of a XML Web Service. In this section, we walk through wrapping a COM object into a SOAP call. This isn’t a task that you would want to code by hand because it is quite complex. It involves peering into the innards of a COM DLL in much the way Object Browser or the TypeLib component would do. Further, the relevant parts, such as methods and properties, must be converted into an XML file. Instead of a manual operation, we use the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit Version 2.0 or later. You can get a copy from http://msdn.microsoft.com/soap. If you haven’t already done so, install the SOAP toolkit on the web server.

Our Goal: Reusing an Old COM ...