Programming .NET Web Services

Rating:
Summary: VERY GOOD .NET WEB COVERAGE
Review: "Programming .NET Web Services" is an easy-to-understand text, which simplified all the difficult aspects of XML Web Services (as it concerned Microsoft .NET platform).
At 500 pages, this book is not that voluminous, yet, it detailed most of the essential issues needed in order to utilize all the .NET options which one is likely to encounter on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft clients.
I really find this book useful, despite the fact that some of its elaborations are not as extensive as I would like them to be. This textbook is better used as a daily text, or as the case may be, a quick reference resource.

Rating:
Summary: VERY GOOD .NET WEB COVERAGE
Review: "Programming .NET Web Services" is an easy-to-understand text, which simplified all the difficult aspects of XML Web Services (as it concerned Microsoft .NET platform).
At 500 pages, this book is not that voluminous, yet, it detailed most of the essential issues needed in order to utilize all the .NET options which one is likely to encounter on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft clients.
I really find this book useful, despite the fact that some of its elaborations are not as extensive as I would like them to be. This textbook is better used as a daily text, or as the case may be, a quick reference resource.

Rating:
Summary: a good book for .net web service developers
Review: I'm really a java Web Service developer, but picked this book up and read it over a weekend.

This book is a reasonably compact and readable introduction to doing web services in the .net framework, covering everything from the basics of exporting an asmx page to doing transactions as part of a request, debugging and authentication, and other advanced details. I liked the bits on configuring asp.net, as I was never going to go through all the msdn docs to find what I needed.

I'm not going to give it five stars for the following reasons, reasons which make me worry about how much real world web service dev the authors do

1. it presents UDDI unquestioningly. This is tough. We all know UDDI outside the internet is bogus, but it has a place behind the firewall. This book looks at UDDI beyond the firewall like its a good idea.

2. It doesn't worry enough about soap interop. It has a chapter on it, but doesn't go into some of the glaring interop issues you can do in .net like use unsigned datatypes (breaks java), or DataSets (breaks everything but .net). Developers need to know these things if they want us java coders to talk to their service

Rating:
Summary: Great Web Services Text
Review: This book provides a very thorough coverage of web service development using ASP.NET. I found the step-by-step configuration sections to be very helpful, and also found the more detailed coverage of the framework, including ASP.NET security and interop to be helpful. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: one of the best titles for web services developers
Review: This text addresses just about every challenge a web-services developer may face. Whether it involves calling a set of services asynchronously (and somehow keeping the client(s) updated of its progress) - or whether it is monitoring, profiling and logging your web-services - this text contains well explained examples of doing a lot of useful stuff.
It has saved me a lot of time - and I found it well worth the price.

Rating:
Summary: Understand web services in a .NET environment
Review: Web Services are a catchphrase that many Microsoft-centric developers are falling in love with and they don't know why. Hey, the affair isn't limited to Microsoft based development firms. Web Services are hot topics right now. They provide the best way yet to utilize the Internet for remote work.

For the uninitiated (and aren't we all at one time or another), web services are programs that rely on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to expose their interfaces across the Internet. This means you can write a program and, if you make it a web service, you will expose its public interfaces for anyone to use via the Internet.

This book takes a normal O'Reilly tack of presenting in-depth information that is appropriate for users who want to know the wherefores behind the decisions. The authors present the Microsoft/Visual Studio methodology where many of the tedious tasks of Web Service development are performed for the user. They also do a solid job of presenting why that work must be done by someone and how to do it if you don't want to use Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). The book gives good information (about 30 pages) covering Web Service Description Language (WSDL) before it covers the incredible facility VS.NET provides for generating these documents. WSDL docs are necessary for every web service you build if you expect anyone to use your program. The authors explain and lead the reader through the process of writing a web service and consuming a web service. They also expend effort on discussing stateful versus non-stateful web services and how to appropriately choose the best methodology for your application. With the performance gains that can be attained in IIS 6 via caching, the assertion the authors make about considering caching during design phase rather than after development is in testing or production struck a chord. The book covers IIS 6's caching choices as well as explaining the benefits and drawbacks of both. I didn't finish the debugging and security sections but plan to get back into the book and finish them as they look valuable.

In conclusion, if you want to mine a book for a robust understanding of web services and the constituent pieces of that technology (with all your examples in C#) then this book is for you. If you're looking to get a 5 minute read and start throwing code (and probably exceptions), pick up a less thorough book. You'll actually read this one instead of just looking for examples to copy. The information this book imparts should be standard knowledge for anyone that expects to write production quality web services.

Rating:
Summary: Understand web services in a .NET environment
Review: Web Services are a catchphrase that many Microsoft-centric developers are falling in love with and they don't know why. Hey, the affair isn't limited to Microsoft based development firms. Web Services are hot topics right now. They provide the best way yet to utilize the Internet for remote work.

For the uninitiated (and aren't we all at one time or another), web services are programs that rely on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to expose their interfaces across the Internet. This means you can write a program and, if you make it a web service, you will expose its public interfaces for anyone to use via the Internet.

This book takes a normal O'Reilly tack of presenting in-depth information that is appropriate for users who want to know the wherefores behind the decisions. The authors present the Microsoft/Visual Studio methodology where many of the tedious tasks of Web Service development are performed for the user. They also do a solid job of presenting why that work must be done by someone and how to do it if you don't want to use Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). The book gives good information (about 30 pages) covering Web Service Description Language (WSDL) before it covers the incredible facility VS.NET provides for generating these documents. WSDL docs are necessary for every web service you build if you expect anyone to use your program. The authors explain and lead the reader through the process of writing a web service and consuming a web service. They also expend effort on discussing stateful versus non-stateful web services and how to appropriately choose the best methodology for your application. With the performance gains that can be attained in IIS 6 via caching, the assertion the authors make about considering caching during design phase rather than after development is in testing or production struck a chord. The book covers IIS 6's caching choices as well as explaining the benefits and drawbacks of both. I didn't finish the debugging and security sections but plan to get back into the book and finish them as they look valuable.

In conclusion, if you want to mine a book for a robust understanding of web services and the constituent pieces of that technology (with all your examples in C#) then this book is for you. If you're looking to get a 5 minute read and start throwing code (and probably exceptions), pick up a less thorough book. You'll actually read this one instead of just looking for examples to copy. The information this book imparts should be standard knowledge for anyone that expects to write production quality web services.