What is .Net Web Service?

• Web service is the way to publish application's function on web that can be accessible to the rest of the world.
• Web services are the components that can be used by other applications
• ASP.NET offers easy way to develop web services, just precede the functions with a special WebMethod ()> attribute in order them to work as Web Service.
• Web services are discovered using UDDI directory services.
• Web services are built on XML standard and use SOAP protocol that allows them to communicate across different platforms and programming languages.
• Web services easily manage to work across corporate firewalls as they use HTTP protocol which is firewall friendly.
• Web services platform elements are
  SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
  UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)
  WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
• The web services are built on internet standards that are not platform or language specific.
• The .Net framework provides in-built classes to build and consume web services.
• The components offered by web services are reusable.
• The examples of web service components can be shipment tracking, translation utility, weather forecasting, sports scores etc.

.NET web service

What is SOAP?

SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol is a communication protocol, a way to structure data before transmitting it, is based on XML standard. It is developed to allow communication between applications of different platforms and programming languages via internet.

It can use range of protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, Post office protocal 3(POP3) to carry documents.

Http-Get, Http-Post works with name/value pair which means transferring complex object is not possible with these protocols, whereas SOAP serializes complex structure, such as ASP.NET DataSets, complex arrays, custom types and XML nodes before transmitting and thus allows exchange of complex objects between applications.

Two components can easily communicate using Remote Procedure Calls protocol. But because of their compatibility and security issues, most of firewalls and proxy server block this type of messages. SOAP uses HTTP channel to transport which makes it widely accepted protocal over the internet.

What is WSDL?

WSDL stands for Web Ser
vices Description Language, an XML-based language that describes Web services and how to access and locate them.

What is UDDI?

UDDI stands for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. It is an open, Internet-based specification that offers directory service for storing information about web services