Website Design Ecommerce Solutions: What are the steps in creating and consuming a Web service using Visual Studio .Net? In this paper, you will first learn how to build a Web service and publish the service. Then you will learn how to build a client application that discovers the Web service and consumes the services offered.

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by Soumya Guptha, technical marketing engineer
Intel Corp. Software and Solutions Group

What are the steps in creating and consuming a Web service using Visual Studio .Net? In this paper, you will first learn how to build a Web service and publish the service. Then you will learn how to build a client application that discovers the Web service and consumes the services offered. Code samples are provided for building a Web service and the client application.

If you examine the history of distributed computing, the advent of Web services has been a natural evolution. Over time, applications have become more loosely coupled, and a single application is split into multiple components and spread across different systems. Enterprises used proprietary architectures and solutions for their applications to communicate with each other, but also used component-based development and technologies like COM, DCOM, and CORBA. This was a great Intranet solution. As CBD achieved its goal, people started thinking of assembling these off the shelf components anywhere across the Internet. This means that solutions no longer resided within the four walls of an organization. For successful e-commerce, you need to identify your business partners, suppliers, and customers, and exchange data and services anywhere across the Internet. So the question is: how are you going to achieve this?

Web services represent the next step in the evolution of distributed computing. Web services are programmatic components that allow data and services to seamlessly communicate with each other in a distributed environment using standard technologies such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), XML (Extensible Markup Language) and WSDL (Web services Description Language).

Now you may be wondering how to get some hands-on building and discovering Web services. Let's take a scenario where you are a software developer and you want to build an application that allows your customers to buy items in your store. You also want to periodically query the inventory to see if your store is running low on its inventory level and order low stock items for your store. How do you do this? Typically, you get on the phone, call the distributor, and order what you need. Imagine how cool it would be if an application automatically detects that your store is running low on inventory, contacts the distributor, and orders supplies. Fortunately, Web services can make your dreams come true.