Chapter 18. XML Web Services

XML Web services represent a new form of Web and distributed application development that allows you to expose functionality and data to a diverse range of client applications on the network. ASP.NET greatly simplifies the development of XML Web services. Furthermore, server controls can simplify the creation of dynamic user interfaces based on information retrieved from Web services by encapsulating the logic to access the Web service.

A detailed discussion of XML Web services is beyond the scope of this book. In this chapter, we will assume that you have some experience developing or using Web services. We will first briefly review the implementation of a simple Web service and then focus on integrating Web service functionality into an associated server control. We also will describe how a control can optimize the performance of the page by caching the results of a Web service instead of accessing it upon every request.