Programming .Net Web Services [Paperback]

Alex Ferrara (Author), Matthew MacDonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0596002505 | ISBN-13: 978-0596002503 | Edition: 1

Web services are poised to become a key technology for a wide range of Internet-enabled applications, spanning everything from straight B2B systems to mobile devices and proprietary in-house software. While there are several tools and platforms that can be used for building web services, developers are finding a powerful tool in Microsoft's .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. Designed from scratch to support the development of web services, the .NET Framework simplifies the process--programmers find that tasks that took an hour using the SOAP Toolkit take just minutes.

Programming .NET Web Services is a comprehensive tutorial that teaches you the skills needed to develop web services hosted on the .NET platform. Written for experienced programmers, this book takes you beyond the obvious functionality of ASP.NET or Visual Studio .NET to give you a solid foundation in the building blocks of web services, and leads you step-by-step through the process of creating your own.

Beginning with a close look at the underlying technologies of web services, including the benefits and limitations, Programming .NET Web Services discusses the unique features of the .NET Framework that make creating web services easier, including the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the namespaces used in .NET programming. Filled with numerous code examples using the C# language, the book leads you through some of the more challenging issues of web services development, including the use of proxies, marshalling of complex data types, state management, security, performance tuning and cross-platform implementation. The book also covers:

• Creating and publishing your first web service
• The UDDI project, tModels and what they mean for web service publishers Securing web service applications

Written for programmers who are familiar with the .NET Framework and interested in building industrial-strength web services, Programming .NET Web Services is full of practical information and good old-fashioned advice.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

is President of ProseTech, a software documentation consultancy, and a project manager at VoiceIQ (http://www.voiceiq.com/), a provider of software for interactive voice-enabled applications and services. Matthew is a coauthor of the ASP.NET in a Nutshell (O'Reilly), and a contributor to the C# in a Nutshell (O'Reilly) API reference.

Product Details

• Paperback: 414 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (October 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596002505
• ISBN-13: 978-0596002503
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #250,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #36 in Books > Computers & Technology > Microsoft > Development > .NET
  • #38 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > XML

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Understand web services in a .NET environment, May 27, 2003

By 

Kevin D. Riggs "Kevin Riggs" (TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Programming .Net Web Services (Paperback)

Web Services are a catchphrase that many Microsoft-centric developers are falling in love with and they don't know why. Hey, the affair isn't limited to Microsoft based development firms. Web Services are hot topics right now. They provide the best way yet to utilize the Internet for remote work.

For the uninitiated (and aren't we all at one time or another), web services are programs that rely on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to expose their interfaces across the Internet. This means you can write a program and, if you make it a web service, you will expose its public interfaces for anyone to use via the Internet.

This book takes a normal O'Reilly tack of presenting in-depth information that is appropriate for users who want to know the wherefores behind the decisions. The authors present the Microsoft/Visual Studio methodology where many of the tedious tasks of Web Service development are performed for the user. They also do a solid job of presenting why that work must be done by someone and how to do it if you don't want to use Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). The book gives good information (about 30 pages) covering Web Service Description Language (WSDL) before it covers the incredible facility VS.NET provides for generating these documents. WSDL docs are necessary for every web service you build if you expect anyone to use your program. The authors explain and lead the reader through the process of writing a web service and consuming a web service. They also expend effort on discussing stateful versus non-stateful web services and how to appropriately choose the best methodology for your application. With the performance gains that can be attained in IIS 6 via caching, the assertion the authors make about considering caching during design phase rather than after development is in testing or production struck a chord. The book covers IIS 6's caching choices as well as explaining the benefits and drawbacks of both. I didn't finish the debugging and security sections but plan to get back into the book and finish them as they look valuable.

In conclusion, if you want to mine a book for a robust understanding of web services and the constituent pieces of that technology (with all your examples in C#) then this book is for you. If you're looking to get a 5 minute read and start throwing code (and probably exceptions), pick up a less thorough book. You'll actually read this one instead of just looking for examples to copy. The information this book imparts should be standard knowledge for anyone that expects to write production quality web services.

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a good book for .net web service developers, October 30, 2002

By 

Steve Loughran - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming .Net Web Services (Paperback)

I'm really a java Web Service developer, but picked this book up and read it over a weekend.

This book is a reasonably compact and readable introduction to doing web services in the .net framework, covering everything from the basics of exporting an asmx page to doing transactions as part of a request, debugging and authentication, and other advanced details. I liked the bits on configuring asp.net, as I was never going to go through all the msdn docs to find what I needed.

I'm not going to give it five stars for the following reasons, reasons which make me worry about how much real world web service dev the authors do

1. it presents UDDI unquestioningly. This is tough. We all know UDDI outside the internet is bogus, but it has a place behind the firewall. This book looks at UDDI beyond the firewall like its a good idea.

2. It doesn't worry enough about soap interop. It has a chapter on it, but doesn't go into some of the glaring interop issues you can do in .net like use unsigned datatypes (breaks java), or DataSets (breaks everything but .net). Developers need to know these things if they want us java coders to talk to their service

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the best titles for web services developers, October 13, 2003

By 

avarma "avarma" (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Programming .Net Web Services (Paperback)

This text addresses just about every challenge a web-services developer may face. Whether it involves calling a set of services asynchronously (and somehow keeping the client(s) updated of its progress) - or whether it is monitoring, profiling and logging your web-services - this text contains well explained examples of doing a lot of useful stuff.
It has saved me a lot of time - and I found it well worth the price.