Gregory Brill - CodeNotes for Web Services in Java and .NET

Contents

What readers have to say about CodeNotes

I bought two of your CodeNotes books and Im a true believerwell written and concise, and I will quickly snatch up the rest as they become available.DAN, California

First, I must say Im so impressed with this book (and, by extension, with the series). [The information] tends to be delivered in the form of concise, accurate writing by experts who dont dumb down the material but rather... give a high-level overview. Thanks for such a wonderful series and please keep them coming!ARTHUR, Maryland

CodeNotes offers a good general overview of the .NET platform and the technologies. In short, I believe Random House has hit the bulls eye with the CodeNotes tight and coherent format.PRIIT, New York

I just picked up two of the books in the CodeNotes series and am I ever pleased! Well written, helpful, and to the point. Even better is the fact you can hold them in your hand, take them on a plane, and generally enjoy them. No more of the bloated tomes filled with useless code and explanations, or CDs that are simply advertising vehicles. Cant wait to pick up a few more! Congrats on a great concept, well executed and well delivered.MARK, Canada

I will be using [CodeNotes] quite often while on engagements as they are compact, concise, and something that I can hand to a developer who I need to get up to speed on a technology, and they can read it by the next day and get to work. And they are nice, small references to have around that dont weigh 9 pounds (with 8.5 pounds of useless information).LEE, Oklahoma

Ive recently discovered the CodeNotes series and have become a big fan. The admirable goal of these books is to give you a practical understanding of the subject in 200 pages or less. Ive got three of these books and find them all to be well written, appropriately concise, yet filled with whats necessary to get you up to speed on the subject matter.... I applaud these sorts of books making an inroad into the technical shelves. More often than not, I dont need a 1,000-page technical epic that is a chore to both carry around and actually read.TOM, Illinois

This is a great little book. If you are like menot a programmer, but [someone who] ends up doing lots of the web front-end development tasks because the real developers dont do scripting,'then this book is for you. It gives real-life examples that can be used to get you started on that dynamically cascading menu or that regular expression to validate your data-entry field.TUDOR, Australia

Ive been developing software for thirty years and have often read big fat technology intro/overview books that mostly miss the mark. I need to get up to speed quickly on the .NET technologies, and recently purchased three CodeNotes for my Palm handheld. These are the most fantastic technical overviews I have ever read! They assume an intelligent reader, yet explain core concepts in a very straightforward manner. The pointers to the Code Gallery are an excellent solution to reducing book size/reading time, while providing access to more details for those who want it. The samples in the books are terse and informative. The writing style is very comfortable. I could go on and on. Great job, folks!DAVID, Wisconsin

Acknowledgments

First, thanks to John Gomez who saw the potential of the CodeNotes idea before anyone else and introduced me to Random House. Without John, there would be no CodeNotes. Id also like to thank Annik LaFarge, who fearlessly championed the series and whose creativity, enthusiasm, and publishing savvy have been instrumental in its creation. Thank you to Mary Bahr, our unflappable editor, who paved the way and crafted the marketing. Thank you to Ann Godoff whose strength, decisiveness, and wisdom gave CodeNotes just the momentum it needed. And, of course, the production, sales, and business teams at Random House, with particular thanks to Howard Weill, Jean Cody, and Richard Elman.

On the Infusion Development side, thank you to Sheldon Fernandez for his help with .NET, and the CodeNotes reviewers, who gave us invaluable feedback and suggestions on our early drafts. And thank you to the entire cast and crew of Infusion Development Corporation, who have supported and encouraged this venture throughout, with special gratitude to Irene Wilk-Dominique, Jessica Pollack, and DeBorah Johnson, who helped administrate and manage so much of this process. I know CodeNotes was extremely trying, tough to do, and involved an awesome amount of research, writing, and editing. But here it is... exactly as we envisioned it.

Gregory Brill

Using CodeNotes

PHILOSOPHY

The CodeNotes philosophy is that the core concepts of any technology can be presented succinctly. The product of many years of consulting and training experience, the CodeNotes series is designed to make you productive in a technology in as short a time as possible.

CODENOTES POINTERS

Throughout the book you will encounter CodeNotes pointers: WS010101. Notice that the first two letters are W and S (as in Web Services) and the remaining characters are numbers. These pointers are links to additional content available on-line at the CodeNotes website. To use a CodeNotes pointer, simply point a web browser to http://www.codenotes.com and enter the pointer number. The website will direct you to an article or an example that provides additional information about the topic.

CODENOTES STYLE

The CodeNotes series follows certain style guidelines:

Code objects and code keywords are highlighted using a special font. For example: array[3].

Code blocks, screen output, and command lines are placed in individual blocks with a special font:

//This is an example code block

Listing ChapterNumber.ListingNumber Some code

What You Need to Know Before Continuing

In order to take full advantage of this book, you should be familiar with certain technologies before continuing.

XML

Web services are fundamentally linked to XML. You cant work with web services without working with XML at some level. In order to understand the web service languages, you will need to know the basics of XML. In particular, you should understand what makes a valid XML document, XML namespaces, and the XML Schema specification. If you have never worked with XML, please consult CodeNotes for XML or see WS010002for a quick refresher.

JAVA

Many of the examples in this book assume you have a working knowledge of Java. In particular, you should be familiar with Java fundamentals (creating and compiling class files, basic language structure), the Collections Framework, I/O classes, and servlets. If you would like a quick refresher on these topics or you are new to Java, you should consult CodeNotes for J2EE and CodeNotes for Java.

.NET FRAMEWORK, C#, VB.NET, AND ASP.NET

Many of the examples in this book are built on the .NET framework using a combination of VB.NET, C#, and ASP.NET. If you are familiar with C++, Java, or Visual Basic, then the examples shouldnt be too difficult to follow. However, if you would like to learn more about any of these languages or get a complete introduction to the .NET framework, please see