Building Web Services with Visual Basic.NET

Web services form the cornerstone of the .NET architecture, and play a pivotal role in the future of Web development. In essence, a Web service is a piece of programming logic with properties and methods that have been exposed to the Web. Developers can utilize this functionality in their own applications via standardized protocols such as HTTP, SOAP, and XML. This use of standards is extremely important, since it makes Web services consumable by any Web-aware language that understands SOAP and XML. Web services will be heavily used to provide "black box" functionality to applications for such tasks as notification services, messaging, and data services. This text covers the basics of building and understanding XML Web services, as well as how they can be built from the ground up and how to make them secure. Developers can use this book as a reference guide once they get up to speed on developing XML Web services with Visual Basic .NET. The text covers information from creating XML Web services, to deployment, transactions, versioning, and security. It also includes a protocol reference section with appendices that cover HTTP, SOAP, XML WSDL, and UDDI.