Cross-Platform Web Services Using C# & JAVA (Charles River Media Internet & Web Design)

Prerequisites for Using .NET Web Services

To use either Visual Studio.NET or the .NET Framework SDK, you will need to have Internet Information Server (IIS) installed on your system. This means that you’ll need to be using Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, or Windows XP Professional. Unfortunately, IIS and .NET do not run on the consumer Windows installations such as Windows ME or Windows 98.

To install the Web server (and note that this procedure works on all three supported operating systems), go to “Start” and then “Control Panel.” Select “Add/Remove Programs.”

On the lefthand side there is an icon that says “Add/Remove Windows Components.”

Click on that icon. Figure 6.1 shows the “Add/Remove Windows Components” dialogue on Windows 2000.

Figure 6.2 shows the “Add/Remove Windows Components” dialogue for Windows 2000. Note that the box for “Internet Information Services” is already checked for this system. This means that the server is already installed in this case.

Figure 6.1: The “Add/Remove Programs” dialogue for Windows 2000. Notice the “Add/Remove Windows Components” on the lefthand side.

Figure 6.2: The dialogue to select which Windows components to install.

If this box is unchecked, check it and insert the CD-ROM for the operating system installed on your computer and click “Next.” The dialogue that comes up guides you through the installation of IIS. It will ask you to choose a home directory for a Web site on your system. You should choose a directory that’s convenient for you. On the author’s system, the root directory is c:\inetpub.

Once IIS is installed, you can install either Visual Studio.NET or the .NET Framework SDK. The instructions for installing these programs are straightforward and come with installation programs, but you may want to move one MS DOS Batch (bat) file to someplace convenient. Corvars.bat sets up the DOS environment on your PC so that you can use the .NET framework SDK to compile the various code examples in this chapter on your PC. You can set up the installation programs for either .NET product to set these for you automatically, but then they are set all the time and can create a very complex environment on your PC. By allowing the bat file to set this environment for you, you have a convenient way of using the .NET command line tools and the environment vars are only there if you need them. Once IIS and the appropriate .NET environment are installed, you’re ready to begin writing Web Services.