In Chapters 6 through 8, I get into the heart of the book and explain ASP.NET and Remoting, the core .NET technologies that enable developers to quickly build and consume Web services. These seemingly overlapping technologies have distinctly different goals. The primary focus of ASP.NET Web services is to maintain the fidelity of the instances of XML datatypes passed between the client and the server. This is in sharp contrast to Remoting, in which the primary focus is to maintain the fidelity of the instances of .NET types passed between the client and the server. In time, these two goals will be achieved by a unified technology set. In the remaining chapters of the book, I cover specific topics relevant to most productionquality Web services. Chapter 9 explains how to leverage UDDI and DISCO to advertise your Web service and discover other Web services. In Chapter 10, I examine strategies for ensuring that your Web services are secure. In Chapter 11, I explain how to debug your Web service. Chapter 12 offers strategies for ensuring that your Web service meets your scalability and availability needs. Finally, in Chapter 13, I examine some of the problems involved in building Web services today and introduce emerging technologies that are aimed at addressing these problems.
If You Are in a Hurry Sometimes I have been engaged in a project for which I need to use a technology that I know little or nothing about. In these cases, I try to learn just enough about the technology to solve the problem at hand. When you find yourself in such a situation, take advantage of the fact that I wrote each chapter of this book to be read individually, without requiring the previous chapters as background. For example, you can pick up the book and start reading Chapter 6, the ASP.NET chapter, without first reading the chapters on SOAP, XML Schema, or WSDL. So, without further ado, here is what I recommend you do if you want to get up to speed as quickly as possible developing and consuming Web services: Skim through Chapter 1 to get a sense of how the technologies and protocols that compose Web services fit together. Read Chapter 2, and load Visual Studio .NET to follow the steps presented as I build two simple applications. This will help familiarize you with developing basic Web services using the Visual Studio .NET tool set. Pick out the important pieces of Chapter 6 that apply to your project. Read the “Interactive Debugging� section of Chapter 11, which is about debugging Web services using the Visual Studio .NET debugger. Read Chapters 9 and 10 (on Discovery and Security, respectively) as needed. Throughout the course of the project, thoroughly read Chapters 6 and 7 to get a concise but in-depth overview of how to use the ASP.NET platform to develop and consume Web services. Finally read the other chapters as needed for your project. For example, if you plan to leverage UDDI, read Chapter 9 for relevant information about publishing your Web services and discovering other Web services.
System Requirements
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