Summary

Chapter 2

Creating a Basic Web Service

In this chapter, I show you how to build a couple of Web services so that you can see how easy it is to do. In later chapters, when I discuss the underlying protocols, you will more fully appreciate how much complexity is abstracted for you by the .NET platform. In this chapter, I make high-level references to those underlying technologies to give you a basic understanding of where they fit into the larger picture.

In the first example, you create a simple commerce application in Microsoft ASP.NET—a Web Form for collecting payment information. Then you create a Web service that performs credit card validation business logic on behalf of the application. This example shows you how easy it is to refactor an existing .NET application to move business logic into a Web service so that it can be used by other applications.

In the second example, you create a Web service for sending and receiving binary files. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, messages between the Web service and the client are encoded in XML. Because XML is a text-based markup language, we can encode something into the message that might be surprising: the contents of a binary file. The binary file is contained within a complex type. The complex type also contains information about the file. This example demonstrates to you the robustness of the underlying .NET Framework.

These two scenarios should give you a good idea of what the .NET platform offers. I also show you in this chapter how the rapid application development capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET simplify development of applications that expose or consume Web services. Because the best way to learn is by doing, I encourage you to fire up Visual Studio .NET and step through the processes I describe to create the sample applications yourself.