Chapter 1. Create Your First Web Service

IN THIS CHAPTER

• The “Hello World” Operation

• Other Files in the Project

• Passing Complex Types

• Returning Arrays of Simple Types

• Returning Arrays of Structures

If you have never written a Visual Basic .NET Web Service before, you are in the right place. You may be under the impression that Web Services are hard to write and deploy. With many toolkits, that impression is 100% correct. Fortunately, .NET was designed with Web Services in mind, making their coding and deployment an easy task. As someone who has used several of the more popular toolkits out there, I can honestly say that .NET is by far the easiest to use.

In this chapter, we are going to develop a Web Service that exposes a set of operations that demonstrate what .NET can do for you without you knowing a thing about what is going on under the covers. The demonstration will showcase the following items:

• A “Hello World” operation that shows the basics

• Returning a simple structure

• Returning an array of simple data types

• Returning an array of complex data types

The reason we are focusing on returning the items instead of passing them as arguments is simple—.NET will allow me to show you the results of the operations through Internet Explorer. To do so, all I have to do is make sure that none of the operations takes a complex type as an argument. In Chapter 2, “Consuming Your Web Service,” we will look at how easy it is to write a client for this Web Service.

Let's dig in!