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Professional ASP.NET Web Services, by Matthew Reynolds, Brian Loesgen,
Andreas Eide, Bill Sempf, Srinivasa Sivakumar, Mike Clark, Christopher
L Miller, Robert Eisenberg, Mike Batongbacal, Brandon Bohling and
Russ Basiura is the first (and at this point, likely the only) comprehensive
book focusing entirely on Webservices on the .NET Platform.
And comprehensive it is - not only does this book take you through
virtually all aspects of webservices from the ground up - it also
deals extensively with the .NET -specific intricacies such as security
and SOAP extensions.
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XML/SOAP based webservices have become ubiquitous as
a standardized, extensible way to provide distributed computing over the
wire, and Microsoft is clearly in the lead with at least a year's head
start over other vendors in providing the programming infrastructure to
help developers make webservices a reality with the Visual Studio.NET
IDE and the .NET Framework.
This book will show you how to
create high-quality Web Services using ASP.NET. It describes, in great
and intricate detail, the core standards to the Web Services architecture
and examines how these standards are integrated into ASP.NET. The processes
involved in building webservices, handling security, authentication,
design and accommodation for other platforms, and much more are all covered
thoroughly and in granular detail.
Chapters 1 and 2 lay the groundwork to a complete understanding
of XML webservices and SOAP under the .NET platform specific to ASP.NET.
Chapter 3 goes into detail about the use of proxy classes
to consume webservices, and Chapter 4 includes complete coverage of WSDL
including binding extensions.
Chapter 5 covers standard wire formats and data types
with an introduction to the SOAP format, and Chapter 6 covers custom SOAP
techniques including my favorite, SOAP Extensions, plus valuable information
about encoding and XML Serialization.
Chapter 7, Web Service Discovery, covers the three main discovery files
common to the .NET platform - .disco, .vsdisco, and .map, plus information
about UDDI.
Chapter 8 has in - depth discussions about when and
when not to use Webservices and covers some important design criteria
for designing at the enterprise level. This leads to Chapter 9 which focuses
solely on the Asynchronous webservice interface modes and methods.
You would think that's about as complete a discussion
of webservices you'll ever get, but there's more- subsequent chapters
include extensive detail about state management, using transactions with
webservices, data caching, authentication, and finally, an extensive review
of SOAP security including a second complete example of SOAP extensions
with data encryption using native .NET classes. (Unfortunately, they didn't
show how to use SOAP Extensions outbound from the client, but I'll post
an article here on Eggheadcafe.com shortly that illustrates how to do
it.).
Chapter 17 discusses how to use Webservices in your business,
and the book ends with chapters that have case studies on Biztalk, a Passport-style
authentication service, and a distributed processing service. Finally
there are appendices that deal with .NET My Services, the IE5 Webservice
Behavior, and a sample article from ASPToday, Wrox's "pay for it"
article base.
In sum, this is the most complete and extensive single
book on the market today covering webservices as they relate to the .NET
Platform. It's thorough,and it has information in it that you are highly
unlikely to find elsewhere. If you are interested in Webservices beyond
the curiosity level that occupies most programmers' minds, and intend
to make full use of this new technology in your enterprise as a developer
or consultant, then you need this book.
Peter Bromberg is an independent consultant specializing in distributed .NET solutions
Inc. in Orlando and a co-developer of the EggheadCafe.com
developer website. He can be reached at pbromberg@yahoo.com
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