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In this Chapter, we provided an introduction to web services, showing how they’re not only an open standard in themselves, but are built up from other open standards such as HTTP and XML. You’ve seen that by making use of web services, you have a method for allowing disparate applications to interact with one another very simply, where it would have taken a great deal of painstaking integration work in the past.

These features and ease of use were put into action in the development of web service functionality for our Friends Reunion application. By creating a test application, we showed how this functionality can be used (consumed) as simply as any other object in .NET, once a reference has been added within the project.

After we created and used our own web services, we took a look at one of the key underlying technologies of web services, SOAP, which allows information to be passed around in a structured XML format. We then went on to look at exception handling, and saw how this tied in to SOAP with the SoapException object.

We then discussed the performance of web services. You saw how you can improve performance by retrieving less data by using built-in mechanisms and by creating your own mechanisms, as well as by taking advantage of and controlling XML serialization support in .NET.

Finally, we looked at how you can publish your web services so that others can use them, and how you can find third-party services to use in your own applications, including a few examples of currently available services that can be used to add further functionality to the Friends Reunion application.