Chapter 31. The System.Web.Services.DiscoveryNamespace
The System.Web.Services.Discovery
namespace includes the
classes that model .NET web service discovery documents (usually seen as .disco
or
.vsdisco
files). These classes are
generally not used directly, as the discovery process is automated in tools such as Visual Studio .NET. However, they could be used to create programs that
worked with discovery documents for reasons other than consuming a given web service.
For example, you could create a utility that parses multiple discovery documents
and retrieves aggregate information.
The discovery process has little to do with Universal Description, Design, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), the cross-vendor initiative for publishing information about business and their web services in an online repository. (In fact, UDDI repositories can provide links to web services or discovery documents.) Discovery documents are a simple approach--essentially nothing more than a collection of links without any associated documentation or categorization. These “links” can point to WSDL service descriptions, XSD schemas, or other discovery documents.
A good starting point to understanding this namespace is the DiscoveryDocument
class,
which represents a single .disco
or .vsdisco
file. The most useful type in this
namespace is the DiscoveryClientProtocol
class, which
allows you to invoke web service discovery programmatically.
Figure 31-1 shows the
types in this namespace.
Figure 31-1. The System.Web.Services.Discovery ...
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