A Web Service is a platform-neutral application that allows servers, clients, PDA's, mobile phones, and other related intelligent devices to remotely invoke operations over the Web. Web Services use XML markup language to facilitate communication between the service provider and the service consumer. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is the transfer protocol used to invoke operations in the service and return information and data from the service. The UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) is the internet based registry that stores and allows access to Web services.
With Visual Studio .NET you can create SOAP Web services.
The tutorials included in this section are:
A Web Service Provider is a server-based application whose task is to provide methods to other applications. The Web Service Provider we create in this tutorial provides two services:
Returns a Product record based on a product code.
Returns the list of all available products on file.
A Web Service Consumer is a client-based application that uses Web services provided by a server (typically called a Web Service Provider). In this tutorial we create three types of Web Service Consumers that use the services of our Web Service Provider. They are:
A Windows application.
A Web ASP.NET application.
A Smart Device application (for example, a Pocket PC).
To develop Web service applications, an ASP.NET enabled Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) version is required.
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Before starting this tutorial, make sure that you have activated and enabled the Demo_PickDP account, exposed the necessary files, and imported the necessary dictionary items as shown in the Database Administration Program tutorial. |