Chapter 15: Making Money with Web Services

Overview

In Chapter 6, “Making .NET Web Services Available to Others,” you examined sites on the Web at which you can post your web services in order to make the services available to others. Depending on your motivations, you may simply want to make your web services freely available to others. In such cases, you should post your web services on as many repositories on the Web as you can find. For those of you who are interested in making money for your web services, this chapter will present several ways you can let potential buyers “test drive” your code before they must buy the web service.

Throughout this book, you have made use of the web services that were created by a variety of sources. To control access to the web services, many of the methods require that programs specify a registration ID (key) each time the program calls one of the web service methods. In this chapter, you will learn how to use ADO.NET to implement a database your web services can use to easily monitor the use of such keys.

When you provide a user with a “test” version of your web service, you may want to limit the operations the service can perform. Your goal is to provide programmers with a way to test your service’s functionality and to motivate the user to later buy an unrestricted version of your service from you.

This chapter will look at a variety of ways in which you can control how or how frequently programs can use your trial service. You will learn how to restrict access to your web services by time, frequency of use, and more. Then, you will learn ways to make it easy for users to upgrade from the trial version of your web service to your full-access version.