How useful was this article? Did you know how many different ways you can access Web services--or how simple it can be to do so, even with help from tools such as Visual Studio or another IDE? What do you think of the author's choice to return DataSets from the Web service? Is this useful, even in non-.NET environments or do you think there's a better choice? Let us know in the .NET Technical discussion forum.
Synchronize Your Databases with .NET Web Services (Part I)
The ever-increasing use of XML is an exciting development in Web site design and construction, and provides new ways for site authors to expose information to visitors. In this two-part article, you'll see how to create a data-driven Web service and explore three different ways to consume it. Then, in part II, you'll see how to use such services to synchronize the content in distributed databases automatically.
by Alex Homer
March 10, 2004
he Web browser/Web server combination used today was originally designed to deliver HTML, which implicitly contains display information as well as data. But this doesn't mean that the Web server must deliver HTML. When a page contains an <img> element, or a hyperlink to a ZIP file, the Web server delivers the content in its native format. OK, so the content might be UU-encoded for transmission across the Internet, but it certainly isn't HTML when it arrives.
Delivering Simple Text Strings
As an example of a non-HTML information delivery, assume that a server uses one of the timeserver resources on the Internet to accurately maintain its internal clock. Therefore you can easily deliver the current time value from the server to any client upon request by generating a response containing the server's current time as a simple string. In ASP.NET, for example, you can use:
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he Web browser/Web server combination used today was originally designed to deliver HTML, which implicitly contains display information as well as data. But this doesn't mean that the Web server must deliver HTML. When a page contains an 
