Jason's Code Journal: Web Service Series Part 1 – Creating a Simple Web Service with .Net

Recently, I've been doing a bunch of work with .Net Web Services. I love how easy it is to set up a new Web Service and open up functionality to organizations outside or inside your company. For example, my team has written a bunch of classes for exposing our companies product data to our web site. It turns out, that some of our partners wanted to have access to that data as well on their web sites. The mechanisms were always there to accomplish this; I could have done one of the following:

Send them a daily Excel spreadsheet with the product data using SQL Server and DTS
Write an XML-RPC method that returned and XML document of our product data

These methods however, took a lot more time to develop than .Net Web Services do. Plus, in both the above methods, there was a lot more work to be done on the client side to call the service.

With .Net Web Services, I can quickly create a new project for the Web Service, import any classes with methods I want to expose, write a proxy method to call the methods I want to expose, compile and whala...A whole new web service for the client to use.

Assuming the client is using .Net, it's simple for them to use as well. All they have to do is add a web reference to the new Web Service and they are ready to start using the methods that it exposes.

Rather than write a whole article on how to create a simple Web Service, I figured I would just post a bunch of good links on this since there are tons of articles out there on creating .Net Web Services. Overall, creating a Web Service is quite simple and using a one is pretty simple as well, assuming you are using .Net Studio. What is not so simple is adding security, writing asynchronous Web Services, and calling Web Services from non-.Net clients. I will be writing articles about my experiences with these later.