Summary

In this chapter, we investigated ways to consume Web services. We started with an overview of the five-step model that .NET uses for consuming Web services: discover the Web service, create a proxy class for the Web service, include a namespace in the client code, create an instance of the proxy class in the client, and access the Web methods via the proxy. We examined all five steps in the course of the chapter. We started with a brief reminder of how to discover Web services before moving on to the building of the client itself.

We considered a variety of possible clients, from the standard, straightforward Web Forms and Windows Forms applications to more esoteric ones that use the SOAP Toolkit, classic ASP, and JScript. We also considered some nonstandard situations, such as using the client to call the service asynchronously or where no user interface existed.

We examined the creation of Web methods in Chapter 7 and looked at clients in this chapter, so it’s at last time to focus on the third part of the equation: the data stores between which the Web method and the client must interact. In the next chapter, we will look at how to use ADO.NET to provide the necessary wrapper for such communications.