Chapter 8: Creating Metadata

Chapter 8

In this book so far we have learned how to use XML to build Web sites, create Web user interfaces, and access databases. What is it about XML that makes the technology so readily pervasive? One answer to this question is that XML is, fundamentally, portable data. In the relatively new world of distributed applications, data, not code, has become the most critical shared resource.

Modern applications need to exchange information about what services they provide, what information they need to provide those services, and how that information should be conveyed. This chapter will explore how this is accomplished. We will begin by explaining the concept of metadata and then move on to discuss how it's used in the Microsoft .NET Developer Studio. We will introduce the topic of Web Services and will use the .NET Developer Studio to create them. We will also explore the .NET Developer Studio's Object Remoting capabilities and how it uses metadata to implement remote object sharing.