Using Visual Studio to Register Your SOAP Endpoint in UDDI
After you have finished writing your Web Service, documented the interfaces, and generally made sure that others should be able to use the code, you then need to make the Web Service itself discoverable. One of the best ways to do this is register the endpoint with a UDDI registry. Visual Studio includes a facility to register a Web Service. In this section, we will walk through the registration of the Web Service created in Chapter 1, “Creating Your First Web Service.” You will see a series of screen shots and simple steps showing you how easy this whole process is. The built-in wizard registers the Web Service with the Microsoft UDDI Web Service. A similar registration may be possible with other UDDI services as they become available.
To access the wizard, open up Visual Studio .NET and go to the Start Page. From the Start Page, select the XML Web Services topic. This brings up a page with two tabs. Select the Register a Service tab. You can also use the tab, Find a Service, to search for Web Services registered with UDDI. You should see the screen in Figure 4.4.
Figure 4.4. Preparing to register a Web Service through Visual Studio .NET.
When on the Register a Service page, click the Register Your XML Web Service Today link. Doing so brings up the screen shown in Figure 4.5. Here, you log in using a Microsoft Passport. If you have not completed development or if you are not quite ready to put the Web Service out for general consumption, you can publish to the test directory. Otherwise, publish to the production registry. Because this example will not be available except through this book, we will register this particular Web Service with the test directory. For this to work, you will have to go to the UDDI Test Directory and login at least once yourself. This directory is located at http://test.uddi.microsoft.com/register.aspx.
Figure 4.5. UDDI login screen.
After you have logged in, create one business entity. The links there will help you along. Make sure to publish that business or you will not be able to follow along. While the site claims that the turnaround may take as long as 24 hours, I have rarely seen the publication take longer than a few seconds. The data will not get replicated to the other member servers for a day. As a result, you will not be able to browse to IBM's UDDI server until the next day.
Next, you are prompted to select the business that will be associated with the Web Service. Figure 4.6 shows the list of business entities available to my Passport ID. I select Seely Enterprises and continue. You will select whatever business you have created.
Figure 4.6. Select the business to associate with the Web Service.
The next page allows you to publish the location of the Web Service and the associated WSDL file. Figure 4.7 shows one way to would publish the sample in Chapter 1.
Figure 4.7. Describing the Web Service to UDDI.
From the screen in Figure 4.7, click the Submit button. If all goes well, you will see the message “Your Web Service has been successfully registered within UDDI.” You can either continue to register more Web Services from this point or stop. If you later search for the Web Service using the Add Web Reference dialog, this Web Service will be discoverable using UDDI. Because it uses a localhost URL, any reader of this book who installs the Chapter 1 example should be able to add a Web Reference using the Test UDDI server. Go ahead and try it.