Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

22.2. .NET Web Services Basics

A Web service is a software component stored on one machine that can be accessed by an application (or other software component) on another machine over a network. The machine on which the Web service resides is referred to as a remote machine. The application (i.e., the client) that accesses the Web service sends a method call over a network to the remote machine, which processes the call and returns a response over the network to the application. This kind of distributed computing benefits various systems. For example, an application without direct access to certain data on another system might be able to retrieve this data via a Web service. Similarly, an application lacking the processing power necessary to ...