17.1 Introduction

Web services are one of the most hyped features of .NET. They facilitate the sharing of information and services among companies and individuals on a programmatic level more elegantly than any other existing technology. The real benefit of using Web services in Visual Studio .NET is that you require nothing more than a simple URL to begin coding against a Web service residing on a remote server as if it were a local object. This cuts out the complexity of establishing network connections, formatting requests, and parsing replies.

From a business perspective, Web services can drastically reduce the development and integration time in rolling out affiliate programs. Online retailers can make their price listings available publicly via Web services to enable third parties to resell their products, knowing that items sold are currently in stock.

Although Web services may make information freely available, this does not imply that all of these services are free. Pay-per-use Web services such as SMS, credit card processing, and postal address lookup can be bought and used by third parties as part of larger applications with minimal effort.

17.2 Creating a Web service

In order to create a Web service, you will require access to an IIS server with the .NET framework installed. You will need administrative rights on this server to develop the Web service directly from Visual Studio .NET. When you install VS.NET, it will install and configure IIS for you.

This first Web service is used to report server variables...