8. .NET My Services

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Chapter 8. .NET My Services

How many different ways are there to apply Web services? No one knows. Some of the possibilities B2B integration over the Internet, application integration inside the firewall, and others were described in Chapter 2. Yet Web services are a powerful idea that can be used in all sorts of ways. New technologies create new applications, and Web services are no exception.

Web services are a broadly useful technology

For instance, the advent of Web services makes possible new approaches to storing and accessing information. Rather than keeping your personal address book on your desktop computer, why not store it on the Internet and access it as a Web service? This would allow information about the people you commonly contact to be accessed from your desktop machine, your personal digital assistant (PDA), your mobile phone, and other devices. Similarly, why not store your calendar or other generally useful information in a similar way? And why not use Web services to notify you when, say, a book that you're interested in arrives at your favorite Web bookstore?

Web services can be used to access personal information on the Internet

.NET My Services, originally code-named HailStorm, is a set of Internet-accessible Web services that provide services such as these. By defining documented interfaces for accessing the information it stores, .NET My Services makes it possible to access that information from a variety of applications and devices. And since storing personal information on the Internet raises significant privacy and security concerns, .NET My Services provides substantial security services for the data it stores. By offering a standard set of Internet-accessible services that can be exploited by software running on any connected device, .NET My Services makes possible a new class of Web-based applications.^[1]

^[1] This chapter describes an early beta version of the .NET My Services technology. Details and perhaps more are likely to change before the final release.

.NET My Services provides Internet access to personal information via the Internet

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