The System.Web.Services Namespace

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ASP.NET Developer's JumpStart
By Paul D. Sheriff, Ken Getz
Table of Contents
Chapter 4.  Overview of .NET Framework Classes


The System.Web.Services Namespace

XML Web Services provide one of the newest and most exciting technologies for development, as far as we're concerned. Although the .NET platform, and Visual Studio .NET in particular, makes it easy to get started creating XML Web Services, Web Services have been available for some time on the Microsoft platform, thanks to the SOAP Toolkit. (Stop by http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml for more information on the SOAP Toolkit and how it can enable you to consume Web Services in non-.NET client applications.)

XML Web Services make it possible to execute method calls provided by objects via the Web. Distributed components have been available for years, in the form of ActiveX components accessed via DCOM, but Web Services make components available over HTTP using SOAP as the underlying messaging protocol. DCOM is a binary standard that doesn't transmit well through firewalls or proxy servers. In addition, DCOM is only supported on platforms running COM, which has basically limited COM/DCOM to Windows platforms.

With Web Services, however, the landscape has changed. The call and response to a Web Service are in XML format and are generally transported over HTTP. This means that the component can be called using simple text and by any client on any platform. The result comes back in XML format, meaning that any client that understands XML can consume the results. Finally, you can code your components using your favorite Microsoft tools and allow those components to be used by people running on Unix or an AS/400 or any other platform that can make HTTP calls and consume XML. Realize that you can consume a Web Service from a Windows application, a Web application, or any other client you can imagine, including the growing set of wireless devices, such as PDAs and Web-enabled phones. This opens up a new world of interoperability and means you can distribute your application on servers around the world and tie them together using just HTTP.

Creating XML Web Services is fairly straightforward, as you will see in the next section. In Part IV of this book, you will learn how to create more fully-functional Web Services. In this chapter, you will just learn to create a simple Web Service, and you'll see a simple way to access that Web Service.

NOTE

We use the term Web Services to refer to the technology that allows you to communicate with objects using specially formatted XML streams, usually over HTTP. The term we ought to be using is XML Web Services, because there are other emerging technologies that provide services over the Web. This terminology becomes distracting, however, and we'll simply refer to it as Web Services throughout the book.


A System.Web.Services Example

In order to create a new Web Service, start by creating a new project in Visual Studio .NET and selecting the ASP.NET Web Service template. Name the new project TestWebService (accepting the default location, http://localhost). Select Service1.asmx in the Solution Explorer window, and select the View, Code menu item to display the associated class. As you can see, Visual Studio .NET has created the shell of the service for you, including commented lines of code showing how to expose public Web methods. Add the following procedure to the sample class:

 <WebMethod()> _ Public Function Hello( _  ByVal Name As String) As String     Return "Hello, " & Name End Function 

The one public function here, Hello, simply returns a greeting to the name you pass in as a parameter.

NOTE

What's the <WebMethod()> text you see in the procedure declaration for? This procedure attribute indicates to the compiler that the procedure should be serialized using the SOAP serializer, for use as part of a Web Service. Without this, you'd simply be creating a public method of a class, just like normal.


Choose the Build, Build Solution menu item to rebuild the project. (This step creates a DLL and places it in a location on your Web server within the project folder.)

It's simple to test the Web Service: Open your Web browser and type in the following URL, replacing the server name and project name if necessary:

 http://localhost/TestWebService/Service1.asmx/ Hello?Name=Paul 

The result that will appear in your browser is the XML response from the Web Service. It will look like this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>   <string xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">Hello, Paul</string> 

If you're not excited yet, think about this: You called a method in a component over standard HTTP and retrieved the result, all over the Internet! (Okay, you're on your local machine, but it could just as easily have been over the Internet!) This is a very powerful technique, and it opens up a whole new way of programming and creating distributed applications.

Normally, you'd call this Web Service from a client application. In Visual Studio .NET, you can simply add a Web reference to your Web Service. This is just like adding a reference to a COM component in previous versions of Visual Studio. After adding the Web reference, you refer to the Web Service as you would any other component.


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    ASP. NET Developer's JumpStart
    ASP.NET Developers JumpStart
    ISBN: 0672323575
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2002
    Pages: 234

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