Sams Teach Yourself Visual Studio® .NET 2003 in 21 Days

Consuming XML Web Services

Every time we come upon XML in this book, I mention that you don't have to know about XML to get anything done with XML. That still holds true. Although an XML Web service returns XML, the controls, classes, and tools in Visual Studio .NET natively read and write XML, so you don't need to understand the XML part—you only need to understand how to get the data from the XML part.

There are probably 50 ways to consume a Web service from any number of client applications. You can use Visual Basic 3, Visual Basic 4, Visual Basic 5, Visual Basic 6, Delphi, FLASH, C++, PowerBuilder—you name it. Because the implementation simply returns text in XML format, anything that can read text can consume a Web service. That's the whole ...