Building XML Web Services for the Microsoft .NET Platform   by Scott Short

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Even developers skeptical of Microsoft are coming to appreciate .NET's potential for rapid development of high-performance web services. Building XML Web Services for the Microsoft .NET Platform gives them a start-to-finish guide to creating .NET web services that build on XML, SOAP, and other industry standards -- both current and "imagined."

Scott Short covers web services architecture, protocols, coding, security, debugging, and much more. Among the topics he covers in detail: using XML schema and ASP.NET in web services; documenting services with WSDL; and maximizing scalability and availability.

Short, who now works at Microsoft after developing enterprise applications for MCI and JD Edwards, concludes with a preview of Microsoft's vision of the future of web services. He introduces the proposed Global XML Web Services Architecture, which seeks to provide standardized, XML-based infrastructure for more complex applications. He also offers a great high-level overview of .NET My Services, Microsoft's approach to storing personal information on the network, for access from multiple locations (i.e., the controversial Passport and the offerings that'll build on it).

The book's extensive code samples are provided on CD-ROM along with the latest version of Microsoft's .NET Framework SDK. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jersey–based marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

From the Publisher

Discover how to revolutionize the online exchange of business information with this in-depth developer's guide to Web Services-the building blocks of the .NET platform. This book takes enterprise developers inside the architecture, protocols, and programming practices for building distributed-object Web Services. The authors also step readers through building a high-end Web Service of their own, using real-world examples and proven strategies. All the book's code examples appear on the companion CD-ROM.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

• Creating an ASP.NET Web Service
• Transport Protocols and Bindings
• Web Service Documentation
• Raising Errors
• SOAP Encoding Styles
• Encoding References
• Interface Inheritance
• Managing State
• Session State
• Application State
• Defining and Processing SOAP Headers
• Processing Unknown Headers
• Using SOAP Extensions
• SOAP Extension Attributes
• SOAP Extension Class
• Using the WSDL Utility to Generate Proxy Code
• Proxy Class
• Cookies
• Summary

ASP.NET, the next generation of the Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) platform, is known for the ease with which it allows you to develop Web applications. It provides a layer of abstraction that lets you focus on solving business problems instead of developing the underlying plumbing, which can greatly increase your productivity. This model has been extended beyond Web Forms to include Web services.

ASP.NET is also popular because it offers a rich set of services that you can leverage when you build applications. With the introduction of ASP.NET, the platform facilitates the rapid creation and consumption of Web services. ASP.NET abstracts the underlying Web services protocols such as SOAP, WSDL, and HTTP away from the developer. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, Web services that expose simple interfaces require little, if any, knowledge of the underlying protocols.

Sometimes you need to exercise a high degree of control over the serialization of the SOAP messages and the format of the WSDL document used to describe the Web service. Fortunately, ASP.NET provides the necessary hooks that allow you to control practically every aspect of the implementation of a Web service. In this chapter, I discuss the hooks ASP.NET provides as well as examples of when to use them.

Web application developers have come to rely on services provided by the ASP platform, such as state management and security. These services have been significantly improved in ASP.NET and can be leveraged to create robust Web services. Additional services such as automatic generation of documentation have also been introduced specifically for Web services.

For a version 1 product, ASP.NET is a remarkably feature-rich and solid development platform. However, as with any V1 product, ASP.NET has some quirks. In this chapter, I talk about many of them and show you how to work through them.