You can hardly pick up a technical magazine, developer conference brochure, or corporate IT strategy document without seeing a reference to Web services. So what is all the hype about? Simply put, Web services allow developers to create unrestricted applications—applications that span different operating systems, hardware platforms, and geographic locations. In this book, I explain what Web services are and how you can leverage the Microsoft .NET platform to build and consume them.
To get the most out of this book, you should be an experienced programmer. The platform on which you have gained your experience is not important. However, you should have a reasonable handle on object-oriented concepts and basic programming constructs.
You should also have some familiarity with basic C# syntax. All examples in this book are written in C#. But even if your primary development language is not C#, the examples are simple enough that you should be able to easily port them to other .NET languages, such as Microsoft Visual Basic.
