The advent of Web Services has introduced a plethora of acronyms. I will try to avoid going into detail about new Web- related acronyms like UDDI, SOAP, XML, XSLT, XSI, and WSDL. However, Web Services represent one of the most exciting features of Visual Basic .NET programming and it will be important for you to have a basic grasp of the facets of Web Services, so you can decide which to focus on and which to ignore.
The introductory material will provide you with a brief overview of the acronym-laden technologies supporting Web Services and a brief review of what Web Services do for us. The bulk of the chapter will focus on the essential mechanics of building and using Web Services.
