Wrap-Up

This chapter introduced ASP.NET Web servicesa technology that enables users to request and receive data via the Internet and promotes software reusability in distributed systems. You learned that a Web service is a class that allows client machines to call the Web service's methods remotely via common data formats and protocols, such as XML, HTTP and SOAP. We discussed several benefits of this kind of distributed computinge.g., clients can access certain data on remote machines, and clients lacking the processing power necessary to perform specific computations can leverage remote machines' resources.

We explained how Visual C# 2005, Visual Web Developer 2005 and the .NET Framework facilitate the creation and consumption of Web services. You learned how to define Web services and Web methods, as well as how to consume them from both Windows applications and ASP.NET Web applications. After explaining the mechanics of Web services through our HugeInteger example, we demonstrated more sophisticated Web services that use session tracking and user-defined types.

In the next chapter, we discuss the low-level details of computer networking. We show how to implement servers and clients that communicate with one another, how to send and receive data via sockets (which make such transmissions as simple as writing to and reading from files, respectively), and how to create a multithreaded server for playing a networked version of the popular game Tic-Tac-Toe.