With distributed applications becoming pervasive, you need tools and techniques to create, destroy, and monitor transactions across multiple platforms and servers. Having these tools and techniques available within a single architecture such as the .NET Framework makes it easy to develop distributed applications and handle transactions. This article looks at the transaction support the .NET Framework provides, which you can use to develop transactional .NET Web services.

I recently attended a major conference where I was surprised to hear many extremely intelligent and talented programmers state that they had not spent a lot of time working with or investigating Web services and what they could do for their companies. When I asked a few of them why, I was shocked to hear that many of them had gotten the idea that Web services were just too much of a pain to work with from C++. I do agree that writing a Web services client from an MFC application requires several steps. However, the magic of Visual C++ is that you can mix native (non-.NET) and managed (.NET) code.

In an e-mail interview with SearchWebServices.com, Kumar talked about the strengths and weaknesses of Secure Sockets Layer and the emerging role of this popular protocol in securing Web services.

There has been a lot of hype about Web services and increasingly,service-oriented architectures (SOAs) in the market. In particular,when it comes to SOA, developers and CIOs alike still demand answers to several key questions. What follows is a Q&A with Mark Colan, IBM's senior e-business evangelist for SOA and Web Services that attempts to answer some of these questions.

Check out the new improvements in productivity, performance, extensibility, and standards support in Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

This article explains the role of integration within the IBM® On Demand model, how integration has historically been used within IT systems, and how to implement On Demand integration using Web services (with its associated problems and available solutions).

(Marcia Gulesian) The financial consequences of your selection of software, hardware, and technology are often dwarfed by your decisions about the other component of every computer-based solution -- that is, people. In order to have a fairly concrete discussion of the roles people occupy in software development, I'll cite specific technologies such as web services and PKI; a specific industry -- healthcare; and a specific government regulation, HIPPA.

Mirroring the latest application development buzz, standards body OASIS is spending a lot of time these days building Web services specifications that address specific business processes or infrastructure needs, rather than building all-encompassing standards.

Web services protocol workshops allow the whole Web services community to be involved in the process of validating and refining Web services specifications. The workshop process helps to produce well-engineered specifications and prove the interoperability of the Web services specifications with interested parties in the industry. This process has many similarities with the process for software development, and is a deliberate attempt to apply the best practices from the Software Engineering community to the task of producing Web services specifications.

Check out the new improvements in productivity, performance, extensibility, and standards support in Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

With the XML messaging API included in the Web Services Enhancements 2.0 toolkit, you can send and receive messages asychronously over a variety of communications protocols. This enables you to build XML messaging applications with much more complex message exchange patterns than previously available.

The financial consequences of your selection of software, hardware, and technology are often dwarfed by your decisions about the other component of every computer-based solution -- that is, people. In order to have a fairly concrete discussion of the roles people occupy in software development, I'll cite specific technologies such as web services and PKI; a specific industry -- healthcare; and a specific government regulation, HIPPA.

Much has been made about the current state of Web services standards development. And yet plenty of developers aren't waiting around for the standards to coalesce (or congeal, as one writer put it).

Learn how to enhance your Microsoft MapPoint Web Service applications with preferential and random sorting.

WSIs (Web services intermediaries) are a unique class of middleware for managing and monitoring Web services. Useful for everything but the smallest of Web services applications, WSIs provide important features such as message routing, security, exception handling, abstraction, message transformation, and logging.

In the first installment of this article, I introduced some design patterns applied to the problem area of web services integration. This article presents more patterns:

Web services management is one of those strange areas. When it is needed, it is critical; and when it is not needed, it is almost certainly moot.

Explore the many possibilities for dealing with opaque data in Web services (including SwA, WS-Attachments and DIME, PASwA, MTOM), and see the problem modeled with a classic childhood toy.

Given that most Web services toolkits make heavy use of object-oriented abstractions, it's easy to ignore what's going on behind the scenes when interacting with a service through a generated proxy class. The Microsoft® .NET Framework makes it possible to generate proxy classes from Web Services Description Language (WSDL) definitions by running wsdl.exe on the command line or by selecting "Add Web Reference" from within Visual Studio® .NET. Then you can take the generated proxy class and simply make method calls in order to invoke operations on the Web service.

Developers are seeing more resources devoted to Web services and are trumpeting the ensuing productivity and business gains, but caution that management buy-in remains an obstacle, as are many of the same issues that hamper traditional development.