Wow! That is all I can say about my “Intro to Web Services – It’s All About the Message” session at the NYC Code Camp. For something that I put together pretty quickly, and under pressure of time constraints, I really like the way this presentation turned out. Except for one small lull with a spur of the moment idea to show how to create Schemas from a dll using the XSD tool (forgot to add the XSD.exe path to my PATH settings) everything seemed to flow well, and I was just a little long on time (thanks to the XSD.exe hiccup). Otherwise, it worked out very well.
If you were not there, don’t worry, I’ll be giving the same presentation at the Central NJ .Net user group in March. If you don’t live in NJ, I have plans to submit it to the upcoming Richmond, VA and Boston Code Camps.
The jist of the speech: no matter if you are using the Code First or the Contract First styles of building web services, it is really the message that matters. We go thru the various styles of web services (POX, XML-RPC, REST, SOAP) comparing and contrasting the styles, and then get down to how to build a SOAP style web service using Visual Studio, both from the Code First and then Contract First approach. The key to this exercise is how you go about building your SOAP web service. If you don’t want to learn XML Schema, you can still focus on the message, and as long as you make the messages separate classes from your business objects. Once you learn to build the messages separate from the business objects, your only obstacle to switching to a contract first approach is learning XML Schema. Thanks to Thinketecture’s wonderful WSCF Visual Studio 2003 extension, it is easy to drive home who easy it is to build web services via the contract first approach.
If you want to download the slide deck, you can get it here.
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