Microsoft® .NET Kick Start

Using Web Services for Interoperability

Even though the .NET platform provides a bidirectional interoperability mechanism— invoking .NET components in COM and invoking COM components in .NET—Web services provide an alternative way of integrating two technologies. Whereas platform-level interoperability mechanisms typically are sufficient and efficient, Web services always provide a standards-based approach for interoperability. The idea is that COM objects can be exposed as Web services using the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit available from http://www.microsoft.com/soaptoolkit. Next, these Web services can be referenced with applications and services developed using .NET. Similarly, the SOAP Toolkit provides a mechanism for COM-based applications to ...