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As well as building 'normal' solutions, Visual Studio can be used to build other types of applications that provide services or support to a more mainstream solution.
Windows service applications are essentially long-running Windows executables or applications. They can be started at boot time and managed as a service, but they do not have a user interface; instead they provide a background service often used by other applications. They are useful if you wish to start an application on a user's PC without the user having to invoke the application.
XML Web services are explained in Chapter 9. They provide a loosely coupled architecture that enables services to be accessed from across the Internet and are seen as the preferred way of building distributed solutions. Previously the developer would have considered Distributed COM, or DCOM; but that has limitations when used across the Internet. XML Web services use a set of standard Internet technologies including SOAP, XML, and HTTP.
Building applications from reusable components has been a goal of developers for many years. By building a set of standard chunks of reusable code that has been tested and debugged, applications can be assembled far more quickly than if developers had to write the same functionality over again. .NET components are the updated way of building reusable chunks of code, and a number of development shops are starting to build libraries of components for use across all new developments.
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