Where .NET Comes into Play

This book examines web services within the .NET environment. You do not have to use .NET to create web services or to create programs that use web services. Many programmers, for example, use Java to create and call web services. However, the .NET environment makes the process of building and consuming web services so easy, I cannot imagine why web service programmers would want to use anything else.

If you have not yet installed Visual Studio .NET on your PC, that’s okay. In Chapter 3, you will learn how to access web services from within your HTML pages using JavaScript!