Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Consuming an ASP.NET Web Service

A web service can be consumed by any client capable of calling the service and managing its results. Visual Studio makes this task easy. It enables you to set a service reference to any service. This process is similar to setting a reference to another .NET library or COM component. After you define this service reference, Visual Studio generates a local proxy class for consuming the service. This enables you to program against the proxy class and not worry about writing service-specific code. Service references can be set inside most any .NET application, including Windows forms, WPF, console applications, and more. Let’s take a look at this process.

Defining a Service Reference

You define a service reference ...