Summary

XML Web Services may revolutionize distributed application development because of their ease of use and .NET's support for creating and consuming these services. In this chapter, you learned the basics of working with XML Web Services:

• In order for XML Web Services to exist in the current environment, developers require a data format, a transfer mechanism, a document specifying the contents of the service, and a mechanism for discovering services. XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI satisfy these requirements.

• Calling XML Web Services without .NET requires a great deal of effort, but it's possible. You just need to create and parse a lot of XML data yourself.

• Using .NET, it's simple to both create and consume Web Services.

• You can use the UDDI service to retrieve a Web reference to an existing service. Once you've set the reference, you can program against the remote object as if it were part of your project.