Microsoft® .NET Kick Start

Asynchronous Web Services

So far in this chapter, you have developed and utilized Web services synchronously, using HTTP as the main protocol for communication. This may be a good enough requirement for some of the simple Web services that we have used as an illustration in this chapter, but in the real world, Web services would typically be used to interface with back-end systems. A number of these back-end systems are not always available and many have longer process times. In scenarios like those, you would typically want to utilize Web services in an asynchronous fashion. Your current program can continue with the current course of execution and after the result is returned, the Web service can provide a call-back mechanism to the calling ...