Chapter 1: Taking Web Services for a Test Drive

Overview

Unlike most discussions of web services that begin with an examination of the underlying network protocols, this chapter sets aside the underlying details and lets you test drive a variety of web services that other developers have created and made available on the Web. You will first experience many of the web services by using your browser to view active server pages that use the web service to implement their processing. Then, after you understand the operation the service performs, you will create a program that puts the service to use.

This chapter’s goal is to give you a hands-on understanding of the types of web services you can create. This chapter makes extensive use of the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET programming environment to create programs that access the web services. You can take advantage of web services using several programming languages. This chapter presents programs and ASP.NET pages written in Visual Basic .NET and C#. If you are not yet programming within the .NET environment, the ease with which Visual Studio .NET lets you integrate web services into your programs should provide you with motivation to migrate to .NET.

In Chapter 2, “Creating Your First Web Services,” you will learn that Visual Studio .NET also makes it easy for you to create your own web services. In Chapter 3, “Accessing Web Services from within HTML Pages,” you will learn how to create HTML pages that interact with web services from within Visual Basic and applications that incorporate Visual Basic, such as Word and Excel. In later chapters, you will learn how to create and interact with web services using other programming languages such as Java and Perl.