In this chapter, we’ve introduced you to the new paradigm of application—the enterprise application. You are no longer restricted to homogeneous platforms for implementing your solutions. With Microsoft Web Services, your solutions can span many different platforms because the communication between Web Services is done through standard Internet protocols such as HTTP and XML. The distributed components in Windows DNA with which you may be familiar are now replaced by Web Services. Using Web Services as components in a distributed environment allows for a heterogeneous system. Not only do the Web Services in your system not have to be implemented in the same language, they don’t even have to be on the same platform. Because of this greater interoperability, Web Services are very suitable for business-to-business (B2B) integration.