Visual Basic® .NET Unleashed

Calling Web Services

The benefit of open standards is that other language and tool vendors can and probably will support Web Services. Because Visual Basic .NET hides much of the marshaling between client and server in the background, you can use Web Services as if they were local objects.

Taking a hint from the “Four Facets of Web Services” from the preceding section, the first thing you will need to do to use a Web Service is to look in a directory for the Web Service. (There are several Web Service examples on this book's Web site, and we will cover how you can use and experiment with those later in this chapter.)

Adding a Web Reference

To use a Web Service, you need to add a reference to the service. The Reference folder in the Solution Explorer ...