Chapter 10. Microsoft SOAP SDK
IN THIS CHAPTER
So far, Microsoft has put forward two SOAP SDKs. Version one used a whimsically named component named the Remote Object Proxy Engine, also called ROPE. In case you don't get the pun, SOAP plus ROPE is “soap on a rope.” People latched onto the Microsoft Developer Network created sample. When Microsoft saw the popularity, they decided to create a more full featured, supported library. MSDN is not a product team and does not have the mission to create this type of software. Instead, the WebData team at Microsoft took over the project and created the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit v2. WebData also owns the MSXML parser, which explains how they got the SOAP toolkit. By the time this book is published, the toolkit will have a third version available that improves upon v2. The differences will not be as radical as those when the product switched from life as an MSDN sample to a supported product.
While this book does focus on .NET based Web Services, you or people in your organization will also have to extend existing applications. Just because you go to Web Services does not mean that you have to abandon your existing investments. This chapter covers the SOAP Toolkit and shows how you can use it.
As a client, the toolkit provides ways to interact with a Web Service using its WSDL file, as well as methods to directly access and manipulate the XML of the SOAP message.
As a server, you are given the same capabilities. The server also provides alternatives in how clients access the endpoint—through Active Server pages (ASP) or Internet Services API (ISAPI).
We will discuss the advantages of each individual interface and how to use them all.
We will first cover the client access scenarios. After that, we will cover server deployment and how to make the service available to others. This will include editing the WSDL files, creating custom type mappers for the server, and showing the differences between the ASP and ISAPI listeners. To explain all of this, we will recreate the client and server that were presented in Chapter 1, “Creating Your First Web Service,” and Chapter 2, “Consuming Your First Web Service.” The first half of the chapter covers the server, and the second half covers the client. Throughout, this chapter assumes that you have a good deal of experience using Visual Basic 6.0 and that you have done some work with ASP. You will need to follow along carefully. It will help out quite a bit if you grab the code from the companion Web site if you have not done so already.