Chapter 2. Creating a Basic Web Service

In this chapter, I show you how to build a couple of Web services so that you can see how easy it is to do. In later chapters, when I discuss the underlying protocols, you will more fully appreciate how much complexity is abstracted for you by the .NET platform. In this chapter, I make high-level references to those underlying technologies to give you a basic understanding of where they fit into the larger picture.

In the first example, you create a simple commerce application in Microsoft ASP.NET—a Web Form for collecting payment information. Then you create a Web service that performs credit card validation business logic on behalf of the application. This example shows you how easy it is to refactor an existing .NET application to move business logic into a Web service so that it can be used by other applications.