Web-Service Descriptions
Web Service Description Language (WSDL) is a specification for encoding the definition of a web service as an XML document. This is analogous to providing type information for traditional COM software components. A web-service description identifies the name and URL of a web service, the web methods that are available from that service, the methods’ parameter names and types, and the methods’ return types.
ASP.NET automatically generates the WSDL documents for web services that it hosts. This document can be viewed by clicking the “Service Description” link in the service test page (refer back to Figure 7-1). A portion of this document for the HelloWebService service is shown in Figure 7-4.
Figure 7-4. Viewing a WSDL document
As you can see in Figure 7-4, the WSDL document is intended more for tools that can read its contents than it is for humans. As shown in the next section, WSDL documents are used by client tools to generate code that knows how to talk to the given web service.
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