Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.NET

Building Input/Output Web Services

In the previous example, you built a very simple Web service. No input parameters were expected, and the output was a predefined string value. Web services are capable of much more than simply providing predefined string values, of course. In this section, I will show you how to build more complex Web services that take in and return a variety of data types.

The following is a list of data types supported in Web services:

• boolean

• byte

• double

• datatype

• enumeration

• float

• int

• long

• short

• string

• unsignedByte

• unsignedInt

• unsignedLong

• unsignedShort

Like any class method, Web services can take in any number of parameters, each using different data types. The types supported by the Web service are largely dependent on the protocol ...