Chapter 19. Web Services
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER
An overview of Web Services
How to create a Web Service with ASP.NET
How to use a Web Service from a Windows Forms application
How to use a Web Service from an ASP.NET client
How to call Web Services asynchronously
How to pass data across Web Services
While Web applications are a front end for the user to access the functionality of an application, Web services are the front end for applications to access the functionality of an application. Web services are server-side programs that listen for messages from client applications and return specific information. This information may come from the Web service itself, from other components in the same domain, or from other Web services.
This chapter does not go into the inner workings of Web services, but you will get enough information to start creating and consuming simple ASP.NET Web services with the help of Visual Studio.
WHERE TO USE WEB SERVICES
To get another view of what Web services are, you can distinguish between user-to-application communication and application-to-application communication. Let's start with a user-to-application communication example: getting some weather information from the Web. Several websites such as weather.msn.com and www.weather.com present weather information in an easy-to-digest format for a human reader. Normally, these pages are read directly by a user.
If you wanted to create a rich client application to display the weather (application-to-application ...
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