Summary

Web services, an evolving distributed-computing architecture, use standard protocols such as HTTP, XML, XSD, SOAP, and WSDL. Web services trim down development and maintenance costs, provide solutions to interoperability issues, and allow business partners to share information or integrate with legacy systems without having to develop specialized interconnection applications. Microsoft .NET provides powerful tools that make the Web service creation and consumption straightforward. This appendix explored ASP.NET Web services in brief. We learned about the WebService directive, WebMethod attribute, WebService attribute, and System.Web.Services.WebService base class. We illustrated asynchronous programming in ASP.NET Web services. Finally, we discussed the demand for higher level functionalities, such as security and reliability for real-time Web services.