Web Services :ASP.Net

Web Services, a technology that is part of ASP.NET. Through Web Services you can make your processing methods available and executable by others on the Web, and you can execute methods on your pages that are made available by others. The general idea is that Web page processing can be handled by your scripts or by scripts housed anywhere on the Web.

Web Services Development Process
In its most simple form, a Web Service is a Visual Basic function that can be called from
anywhere on the Web. The function is created and accessed through the following steps.
As the supplier of a Web Service,

•  Create a Visual Basic class that encapsulates your processing function, much as you would for a local function designed for use from your own Web pages.

•  Convert the class to a Web Service by including special code to identify it as such,saving the class as a .asmx file in a Web-accessible directory.

• Make the URL to your Web Service available to others who wish to use it.In this way, you can supply access to your information without providing or revealing the private internal processes to access it.As the consumer of a Web Service,

• Create a proxy class to access the remote Web Service. A proxy class is a Visual Basic class file with the .vb extension that makes a call to a Web Service.

• Place the Visual Basic class file in your app_Code directory for access by any of your pages requiring the service.

• Create an ASP.NET page that uses the Web Service proxy class to run the function from the provider site.

In this way, your page runs the remote Web Service as a local function even though it resides at the remote site. That is, you instantiate the remote function just as if it resided on your local server