.NET & XML

Choosing a Web Services Provider

Before you begin developing your web service, you need to decide how you’re going host it. You have several choices: ASP.NET and .NET Remoting are the easiest ones to choose, and I’ll be focusing on ASP.NET in these examples, because it’s the option that gives you the most flexibility.

If you choose to serve your web services with ASP.NET, you need to be sure you have a web server capable of serving ASP.NET pages. IIS, the web server that ships with all Windows NT and Windows Server installations, will do just fine. However, if you’re running on Windows XP personal workstation, you don’t have a web server.Describing Web Services

Using the Cassini Personal Web Server

Although you could write your own ASP.NET host with the .NET Framework, Microsoft has developed a sample web server called Cassini, to demonstrate the .NET Framework’s web hosting capabilities. Cassini is written in C#, and comes with source code. You can download it from http://www.asp.net/Projects/Cassini/Download/.

After running cassini.exe to install Cassini, you can start it by double-clicking on the CassiniWebServer.exe icon. This will bring up the start screen shown in Figure 10-1.

You can enter the application directory (where your ASP.NET and HTML files are stored), the port the server will run on, and the virtual root (the path that URLs will be relative to) in the screen. Then click the Start button to start the server. Figure 10-2 shows some possible settings for the Cassini ...