Professional ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Edition: In C# and VB

Chapter 31. Building and Consuming Services

When the .NET Framework 1.0 was first introduced, much of the hype around its release was focused on XML Web services. In fact, Microsoft advertised that the main purpose of the newly released .NET Framework 1.0 was to enable developers to build and consume XML Web services with ease. Unfortunately, the new Web services model was slow to be accepted by the development community because it was so radically different from those that came before. Decision makers in the development community regarded this new Web services model with a cautious eye.

Since then, Microsoft has stopped trumpeting that .NET is all about Web services and instead has really expanded the power of .NET and its relation to applications built within the enterprise. Still, the members of the IT community continued to look long and hard at the Web services model (Microsoft is no longer alone in hyping this new technology), examining how it could help them with their current issues and problems.

This chapter looks at building XML Web services and how you can consume XML Web service interfaces and integrate them into your ASP.NET applications. It begins with the foundations of XML Web services in the .NET world by examining some of the underlying technologies such as SOAP, WSDL, and more.

Communication Between Disparate Systems

It is a diverse world. In a major enterprise, very rarely do you find that the entire organization and its data repositories reside on a single vendor's ...