Chapter 16. Web Services

Web services are the single most hotly hyped feature of the .NET platform, and it’s no wonder—used properly, Web services can wrap legacy components, cross platform boundaries, and even Web-enable traditional rich desktop applications.

One of the most important details you should understand about Web services is that they use exactly the same Microsoft Visual Basic .NET code as any other .NET application. Therefore, you can use all the recipes from earlier chapters in a Web service to access files, connect to a database, process strings with regular expressions, and much more. The recipes in this chapter concentrate on .NET features that are unique to Web services. For example, you’ll learn how to use caching with a Web service (recipes 16.2 and 16.3), how to use transactional Web methods (recipe 16.4), how to leverage Internet Information Services (IIS) authentication (recipe 16.6), and how to extend Web services with SOAP headers and a full-fledged SOAP extension (recipes 16.9 and 16.11).