Introduction

If you have been paying attention to the information technology (IT) industry, you ve probably heard a lot about Web Services. In this chapter we will look at Web Services and how you can use C# to build Web Services and Web applications with Web Forms.

For the first part of the chapter we will look at .NET Web Services. A Web service is basically just an application that exposes its application programming interface (API) through the Web. That means you can invoke the application programmatically over the Web. You will learn how to create a Web service and generate proxy files that help publish your Web Service.

The second part of the chapter will look at developing Web applications using Web Forms. Web Forms are similar to Windows Forms from the last chapter, except the applications that you develop with Web Forms are deployed to a Web server, and users interact with the applications through a Web browser. In this section you will learn how to work with Web Forms and how to use the different controls available through the System.Web and System.Web.UI namespaces.

Web Services Overview

Web Services can generally be described as a remote method call over the Internet. This means that you can build distributed applications that are made up of components that are distributed across the Web. For example, a car company might have a Web service method that allows you to input a car model and it will return a specific part...