Summary

Visual Basic, working together with the .NET runtime, gives developers the ability to easily create Web Services with little or no knowledge of XML, SOAP, or the underlying machinery. Because you will rarely have to concern yourself with the particulars, you can concentrate on developing good, solid code. You can easily pass around simple and complex types, as well as arrays.

In this chapter, we tested the various functions by using the HTTP/GET interface. Web Services can typically be accessed via HTTP/GET, HTTP/POST, and SOAP. The rest of the book will concentrate on talking to Web Services using SOAP. The messages are slightly different from what we showed here. We will look at the SOAP messages being exchanged between the client and server. As a Web Service programmer, you will find it helpful to become very familiar with what these messages look like. Chapter 3, “SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI Explained,” will cover the SOAP protocol in detail.