Chapter 28: Creating and Using a Web Service

Chapter 28

Creating and Using a Web Service

After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• Create a Web service that exposes simple Web methods.

• Test a Web service by using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

• Design classes that can be passed as parameters to a Web method, and returned from a Web method.

• Create a reference to a Web service in a client application.

• Invoke a Web method.

The previous chapters showed you how to create Web forms and build interactive Web applications using Microsoft ASP.NET. Although this approach is appropriate for applications where the client is a Web browser, you will increasingly encounter situations where it is not. As mentioned in previous chapters, the Internet is just a big network. It is possible to build distributed systems from elements that are spread across the Internet—databases, security services, financial components, and so on. The aim of this chapter is to show you how to design, build, and test components that can be accessed over the Internet and integrated into larger applications. You'll also learn how to construct an application that uses the methods exposed by a Web service.