How This Book Is Organized

If You Are in a Hurry

Sometimes I have been engaged in a project for which I need to use a technology that I know little or nothing about. In these cases, I try to learn just enough about the technology to solve the problem at hand. When you find yourself in such a situation, take advantage of the fact that I wrote each chapter of this book to be read individually, without requiring the previous chapters as background. For example, you can pick up the book and start reading Chapter 6, the ASP.NET chapter, without first reading the chapters on SOAP, XML Schema, or WSDL.

So, without further ado, here is what I recommend you do if you want to get up to speed as quickly as possible developing and consuming Web services:

Skim through Chapter 1 to get a sense of how the technologies and protocols that compose Web services fit together.

Read Chapter 2, and load Visual Studio .NET to follow the steps presented as I build two simple applications. This will help familiarize you with developing basic Web services using the Visual Studio .NET tool set.

Pick out the important pieces of Chapter 6 that apply to your project.

Read the “Interactive Debugging” section of Chapter 11, which is about debugging Web services using the Visual Studio .NET debugger.

Read Chapters 9 and 10 (on Discovery and Security, respectively) as needed.

Throughout the course of the project, thoroughly read Chapters 6 and 7 to get a concise but in-depth overview of how to use the ASP.NET platform to develop and consume Web services.

Finally read the other chapters as needed for your project. For example, if you plan to leverage UDDI, read Chapter 9 for relevant information about publishing your Web services and discovering other Web services.