Web Services and Microsoft .NET

A key highlight of the introduction of the .NET platform, the core .NET Framework, has been the support of Web services. If you have been following the initial press releases related to .NET, you will notice the marketing emphasis given to Web services support. It is perhaps true that in a sense, Microsoft, and the whole industry in general, overhyped a whole lot of benefits (also known as immediate ROI) to Web services. However, Web services support in the .NET Framework is for real. Since the initial release of the .NET Framework (version 1.0), a number of technology enhancements (called Web Services Enhancements, discussed later in this chapter) have been released to add manageability, security, and flexibility to Web services.

However, what hasn't changed since the initial release of .NET Framework is how Web services are created and consumed. Web services in .NET Framework are typically created through ASP.NET. As you saw in the previous chapter, ASP.NET is the technology component of .NET that aids in the development of dynamic Web applications. A breakthrough technology enhancement to ASP.NET was the added capability in ASP.NET to define Web services. A new file extension, .asmx, was added as part of ASP.NET, which exposes application and data interface logic as Web services. From a consuming Web services side, .NET Framework provides utilities to generate bindings for Web services (also sometimes known as stubs ), which enables any .NET-supported programming language to access remote or local Web services as simply another method on a class.

ASP.NET Web services intend to achieve the same benefits for Web services that Active Server Pages (ASP, currently evolved as ASP.NET) has achieved for creating dynamic Web pages. As you will see, developing and deploying a Web service using ASP.NET Web services support is as simple as developing and deploying a Web page with an .asmx extension on Internet Information Services (IIS).