Who Should Read This Book

The .NET Framework has been in use for a good two years already, and a great many people are now comfortable developing with it in Microsoft Visual C# or Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. This book is designed for those developers, and in particular those who’ve worked with Web services. This book is not for those who want to learn about Web services completely from scratch, although everything you need to know is contained herein. The only tutorial is in Chapter 1. The rest of the book, as the title suggests, is a programming reference for those who are already familiar with .NET and Web services. The book has three main parts. (A fourth part is devoted to appendixes.)

• Part I looks at the standards that make up the Web service base platform and the classes that provide the functionality of the Microsoft ASP.NET Web service framework.

• Part II explains how to build .asmx services on these core technologies and how to tailor clients to fit any given scenario. It then looks at the functionality available in the .NET Framework that allows you to extend services to be stateful, scalable, transactable, and secure. You’ll also learn why you might want the extra flexibility of writing raw services rather than .asmx services in certain circumstances.

• Part III examines the new developments from Microsoft in the form of Web Services Enhancements (WSE) and the Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA) and looks at what the future is bringing to the world of Web services.

In the interest of keeping this book slightly smaller than the Bible, we’re aiming it squarely at .NET developers. The examples will be mostly in C#. As a brief nod to the world of COM, we’ll look at building a COM-based client for a .NET Web service with the SOAP Toolkit in Chapter 8. If you’re building Web services with Visual C++ and ATL Server, let this book encourage you to start working with .NET.