Beginning InfoPath™ 2003

15.3. Creating a Web Service Using ASP.NET

In the prior chapters you have see how to use C# to manipulate the InfoPath object model and create functions to accomplish tasks using Visual Studio .NET. Although some of your InfoPath development thus far has used HTML and scripting to perform some of those tasks, none has used the Web. It is now time to remedy that.

While there are many languages and platforms you can use to create Web services, to develop Web services for this book you will be using ASP.NET.

15.3.1. Introducing ASP.NET

With .NET developing for the Web becomes easier than ever. ASP.NET is actually even fun to work with. In the past, it has been quite a task to develop applications in ASP. Now you can develop your Web applications in much the same way you do Windows desktop applications, with a few major differences. Those differences really won't even be felt when you create the Web service for this chapter, because you will really just be taking parameters and passing back data.

ASP.NET combines HTML and server-side code such as C# that helps to create dynamic Web pages, which not only provide static Web presentations but also allow user interaction with data. In this chapter, you use Web services for sending and receiving data, not only for the data presentation itself.

Note that when you use Web services Visual Studio (VS) does a lot of the work with setting up how the Web service communicates using SOAP, which is used to transfer the data via XML. SOAP was created ...