Whom This Book Is For

How This Book Is Organized

Developers generally fall into two groups: those who like to learn the underpinnings of a technology before they use it, and those who have little concern about what is going on under the hood and feel comfortable using a tool set that abstracts many of the details. I personally fall into the former category and, chances are, if you have purchased a 400-plus page book dedicated to Web services, so do you. Therefore, I've decided to take a bottom-up approach to presenting Web services and the support that the .NET platform provides for building and consuming them.

It is hard to make sense of the details unless you have a good grounding in how Web services fit into the overall solution, so the first two chapters of the book provide the necessary background. In Chapter 1, I explain the rationale behind Web services. I also present an overview of the underlying protocols and explain how they build on one another to provide an overall solution.

Chapter 2 offers a high-level overview of how to use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to create and consume Web services hosted on the ASP.NET platform. My primary goals in this chapter are to give you an appreciation of how well the ASP.NET runtime abstracts the underlying protocols for the developer and to explain where the protocols come into play in the context of a functioning Web service.

In Chapters 3 through 5, I discuss the core underlying Web services protocols in detail—what some might consider too much detail. Frankly, much of the content in these chapters could have gone into the appendix, but unfortunately the limitations of the publishing process prevented me from making such a drastic change to the structure of the book. So you will have to wait until the second edition.

Meanwhile, I recommend that you skim those chapters the first time through. As you become more involved with Web services, you can give them a more thorough read. There is no better way to advance your understanding of Web services than to have a deep understanding of the underlying protocols, especially if you need to interoperate with a Web service that is hosted on another platform.

In Chapters 6 through 8, I get into the heart of the book and explain ASP.NET and Remoting, the core .NET technologies that enable developers to quickly build and consume Web services. These seemingly overlapping technologies have distinctly different goals. The primary focus of ASP.NET Web services is to maintain the fidelity of the instances of XML datatypes passed between the client and the server. This is in sharp contrast to Remoting, in which the primary focus is to maintain the fidelity of the instances of .NET types passed between the client and the server. In time, these two goals will be achieved by a unified technology set.

In the remaining chapters of the book, I cover specific topics relevant to most production-quality Web services. Chapter 9 explains how to leverage UDDI and DISCO to advertise your Web service and discover other Web services. In Chapter 10, I examine strategies for ensuring that your Web services are secure. In Chapter 11, I explain how to debug your Web service. Chapter 12 offers strategies for ensuring that your Web service meets your scalability and availability needs. Finally, in Chapter 13, I examine some of the problems involved in building Web services today and introduce emerging technologies that are aimed at addressing these problems.