Creating a Web Service - Page 1

Web services provide a common interface for communicating and exchanging data with different systems. That sentence sounds pretty generic and doesn't really help you understand what web services are. Instead, I think the following diagram provides a better idea of what web services are:

So you have this Web Application, and you really want to use your current Applications to communicate with it. Unfortunately, your Applications don't have any idea on how to communicate with the Web Application, but all hope is not lost! Your applications implement a mediator - a Web Service - to convert the requests your applications make into a form that is recognized by the Web Application.

In other words, a web service allows your applications to communicate with whatever is hiding out back. It does not matter what language the applications are coded in, what type of server your Web Application is running on, etc. As long as both the Web Application and your Applications have a common language with which to communicate with the Web Service, then you are good to go! To copy and paste my intro sentence, web services provide a common interface for communicating and exchanging data with different systems.

Now that you have a brief, though possibly twisted view of what Web Services do, let's go about creating one in ASP.NET. Our Web Service will be fairly simple, for I really want this tutorial to be more about how to create a web service using Visual Web Developer/Visual Studio 2005 instead of focusing on the semantics of the C# language.

On the next four pages, I will explain how to create your web service using Visual Studio 2005/Visual Web Developer, and then conclude by explaining how the web service works along with a line-by-line explanation of the code.

Onwards to the next page.

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