Summary

After acquainting you briefly with underlying XML Web services technologies, this chapter provides a firm foundation in creating and using Web services. The chapter attacks the topic on three fronts. First, it tackles building clients for an existing Web service. This will be a common development task because one Web service can have various types of clients that selectively expose Web methods or process the return values from Web methods differently. Second, the chapter shows you how to build a Web service and various clients for it. The Web service sample is a basic one that performs a calculation with dates. However, offering some kind of computation is one likely reason for building a Web service. In addition, the discussion of the sample shows how to deploy the Web service solution and build clients for the deployed solution. The chapter concludes with another Web service sample that illustrates how to perform three common tasks for an Access database via a Web service.