Mutterings

I spent all day today teaching myself how to build a Web Service client using VB.NET. Webify’s technology is all Java-based on the server side but pretty much all of our customers are using .NET on the desktop to call our web services. Unfortunately most of them are not incredibly tech-savvy, especially when it comes to cutting edge stuff like web services. Thus they’ve been struggling to come on board while our deadline fast approaches… <cue omnious music> So I bit the bullet and spent the day figuring out how to call our services using VB.NET so we can provide them with working sample code to integrate with their systems.

The actual web service is relatively straightforward - MS has good support for document/literal services so that was not a problem. The problem was the SOAP headers we require to do authentication and service routing. It turns out that adding custom SOAP headers to .NET is relatively straightforward - you just create a class which mocks the header. For each element, create a property. You use XML serialization attributes to control how those properties are serialized to XML (i.e. the local name and namespace). Once I realized that, it was simple enough to create the headers we require.