Summary

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In this chapter, we examined the purpose of Web services and the technologies they use. You learned how to create Web services simply and quickly using Visual Studio .NET and J#. You can create Web services as ASP.NET components with an ASMX file extension. You can expose Web methods from which ASP.NET will generate a service description in WSDL. Visual Studio .NET allows you to examine and test a Web service through a Web browser.

You learned that complex data types can be passed between a client and a Web service and that object parameters are automatically converted into such complex types defined in WSDL. You can pass DataSet objects and XML documents as parameters or return values to Web service operations. You learned that ASP.NET-based Web services use the same security mechanisms as ASP.NET Web applications and learned how to use ASP.NET state management to keep server-side state on behalf of a Web service client. The chapter also discussed error handling and how to apply an automatic transaction to an ASP.NET Web method. Finally, you learned strategies for exposing existing functionality as Web services.

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