.Net Framework Essentials

Web Services Consumers

Now that you have successfully created a web service, let’s take a look at how this web service is used by web clients.

Web Services clients communicate with web services through standard web protocols. They send and receive XML-encoded messages to and from the web services. This means any application on any platform can access the web services as long as it uses standard web protocols and understands the XML-encoded messages. As mentioned earlier, there are three protocols that the web clients can employ to communicate with the servers (web services): HTTP GET, HTTP POST, and SOAP. We demonstrate next how to build client applications that utilize each of these protocols. These web services-client applications are done in both VB6 and .NET languages, such as C# and VB.NET, to demonstrate the cross-language/cross-platform benefits of Web Services. For example, you can replace the example in VB6 with Perl running on Unix, and the web services should still be serving.

HTTP GET Consumer

Let’s look at how it is done using HTTP GET first, since it is the simplest. In the examples that follow, we use localhost as the name of the web server running the service and PubsWS as the virtual directory. If you have deployed the sample web service on a remote server, you’ll need to substitute the name of the server and virtual directory as appropriate.

If you point your web browser at the web service URL (http://localhost/PubsWS/PubsWS.asmx), it will give you a list of supported ...