Summary

In this chapter, you got a brief introduction to XML Web services. You learned about the infrastructure that ASP.NET provides to create and execute XML Web services. You also saw how to create an XML Web service both with and without Visual Studio .NET. You learned how to call an XML Web service from a managed client using the WSDL tool, which is included with the .NET Framework SDK, or from Visual Studio .NET to generate a proxy. This proxy exposes the same methods as the Web service, and, when you call these methods from a client, it turns the method call into a SOAP request, processes the response, and returns it as the return value from the method.

In the next chapter, I explore the other mechanism that the .NET Framework provides to support distributed application development: .NET remoting. In Chapter 11, I also compare and contrast .NET remoting with XML Web services.