[Nairobi, Kenya]
I MENTIONED in a previous post that I felt ASP.NET programming would be a lucrative ($$$) area for coders looking to move on to bigger and better things. Well, I still believe this, so I’ve been getting up to speed on this excellent technology thanks to Matthew MacDonald’s well-written book (er bible…um, it’s 1148 bloody pages), Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in C#: From Novice to Professional. Here’s a nice book review. You see, I’m eager to take full advantage of the web by using web services as my secret weapon to create powerful applications. This should definitely bring in the big bucks.

For example, I could easily pass or share information (data) between various computer networks (B2B, B2C, etc.). Or, I might simply want a universal method in order to allow other web programmers to execute a shared, public function (programming code that does a particular task) on my web server that returns a piece of information (ie. a price quote, stock lookup, flight info, etc.). At the start of Chapter 21, Matthew does a fantastic job introducing web services. I also love his suggestion on how to “look” at said technology. See for yourself:

Web services enable the same evolution that COM did, with a twist. Web services are indi-vidual units of programming logic that exist on a web server. They can be easily integrated into all sorts of applications, including everything from other ASP.NET applications to simple command-line applications. The twist is that, unlike COM, which is a platform-specific standard, web services are built on a foundation of open standards. These stan-dards allow web services to be created with .NET but consumed on other platforms—or vice versa. In fact, the idea of web services didn’t originate at Microsoft. Other major computer forces such as IBM helped to develop the core standards that Microsoft uses natively in ASP.NET.

The root standard for all the individual web service standards is XML. Because XML is text-based, web service invocations can pass over normal HTTP channels. Other distributed object technologies, such as DCOM, are much more complex, and as a result, they are exceedingly difficult to configure correctly, especially if you need to use them over the Internet. So not only are web services governed by cross-platform standards, but they’re also easier to use.

You can look at web services in two ways. Application programmers (and the .NET Framework) tend to treat a web service as a set of methods that you can call over the Internet. Of course, these methods have all the capabilities that ASP.NET programmers are used to, such as the automatic security and session state facilities discussed in other parts of this book. XML gurus take a different perspective. They prefer to treat web ser-vices as a way to exchange XML messages.

Which perspective you take depends to some extent on the type of web service you are creating. For example, if you need to pass messages through several intermediaries as part of a long-running business-to-business transaction, you’ll have an easier time looking at your web service as a message-passing system. On the other hand, if you’re calling a web service just to get some information—such as a product catalog or stock quote—you’ll probably treat it like any other useful function. {source: Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in C#: From Novice to Professional ; pg. 815}