Chapter 32. The System.Web.Services.Description Namespace

The System.Web.Services.Description namespace includes types used to represent the elements of Web Service Description Language (WSDL), an XML grammar that describes web services and specifies how to interact with them. Web services created with ASP.NET automatically generate their own WSDL documents, which contain all the information a client needs to interact with them and invoke their methods. You can retrieve this document by requesting the appropriate .asmx file with ?WSDL appended to the end of the URL (as in http://www.mysite.com/myservice.asmx?WSDL).

The starting point for understanding this namespace is the ServiceDescription class, which represents the complete WSDL document and provides collections of Binding, Message, Types, and Service objects. The ServiceDescription class also provides Read( ) and Write( ) methods, which allow you to convert between actual WSDL documents and their object representation. Finally, you can also use the ServiceDescriptionReflector class to create a ServiceDescription object based on an existing web service by supplying the web service's URL.