Summary

Throughout this book, you have created many web services, each of which returns a different data type, such as an integer, Boolean, string, or floating-point value, as well as structures and arrays that contain similar values. In this chapter, you created web services that returned arrays of type byte. Using byte arrays, programs can send and receive files (the contents of which the programs and web services can treat simply as byte values) to or from a web service.

Because many sites on the Web make extensive use of multimedia files (images, music, audio, and video), this chapter focused on web services that can send and receive such data. You might, for example, use the techniques this chapter presents to create a web service that lets users purchase and then download music files or professional-quality photo images. In Chapter 13, “Unlocking Remote Access,” you will use byte arrays to return Word, Excel, and other file types from a web service to a remote PC.

In Chapter 14, “Improving Web Page Performance,” you will examine the files the .NET environment uses to implement web services and ways you can use the files to control and optimize the processing the web service performs.