Real World XML Web Services: For VB and VB .NET Developers

4.1. Why Describe Web Services?

If I create a service called WeatherRetriever that exposes one method called GetTemperature like this:

Public GetTemperature(ByVal ZipCode As String) As Single 

I want developers to invoke my Web service so I put together an HTML page that gives people the information they need to invoke it, which is

• The name of the operation (the method) that it exposes, which in this case is GetTemperature. Clients would also need to know that the method takes in the zip code as an xsd:string and returns the current temperature as an xsd:float.

• The protocol they can use to invoke this Web service. In this case, the service is accessible using SOAP over HTTP.

• Whether the service is expecting RPC or document style SOAP messages. ...