Jelle Druyts

Web Services so rock: I'm teaching a .NET Framework course this week and in the Web Services module I thought I'd give a live demo of the wsdl.exe tool that generates proxy classes for Web Services. Normally live demos are not a good idea but hey sometimes you can really get something cool out of them so I figured I'd give it a go.

So I point my brower at xmethods.org to look up an interesting Web Service and I stumbled upon one called InstantMessageAlert that claims it can send instant messages to any of the four major IM services: MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger.

So I sign in to Yahoo, take the wsdl, generate a proxy class, call the SendYahoo method and BANG! Nothing happens Ok so that was a setback. Then I popped up MSN Messenger and called the SendMSN method - et voila: an instant message appears from out of the blue telling me how Web Services rule. And thereby giving me extra credit for my evaluation later on