Creating and Consuming Web Services in Visual Basic®

Reusing an Existing COM Object Within a Web Service

This section assumes that the COM object in question requires state or other things that, on the surface, make it a bad candidate for a Web Service. If all you need to do is write some type handling code or edit the WSDL file, you should be reading Chapter 10 right now. For COM objects that require state, you need to look at some ways of separating the COM object itself from the Web Service interface. You have a number of options, and all of them have different pros and cons associated with them.

You can place requests into a queue. This has the advantage of letting you process requests as they arrive and handle the requests fairly quickly. The downside to this is that you cannot send responses ...