With StrikeIron® OnDemand Web Services™ for Microsoft® Excel, simply and easily drag-and-drop Web services directly into Excel spreadsheets. Build real-time, on-demand access to data without any programming knowledge. Access the latest data from both internal and external Web services and UDDIs. Build "live" Excel spreadsheets!

Bloglines today announced a set of new web services APIs, allowing developers to write applications for reading RSS and Atom feeds by drawing data directly from the Bloglines databases. This is a very significant change in the landscape of RSS/Atom aggregators, the newsreading applications that have become more popular over the past few years. Along with the release of its web services, Bloglines announced that several desktop RSS/Atom aggregators, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and Blogbot, will begin using these APIs to provide additional capabilities in their applications. The Bloglines Web Services make it very easy for developers to use RSS and Atom content for many purposes, and the services will also ease the traffic pileup that aggregators are beginning to cause for many large RSS/Atom publishers.

In the first column of this series, I introduced the WSS4J API. In the second column, I demonstrated the use of XSS4J for XML encryption. In the third column, I implemented the encryption features of WSS4J using the concepts discussed in the second column. And the fourth column of this series demonstrated the use of XSS4J to author XML digital signatures.

We from thinktecture are proud to be an Advocate of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). WS-I is an open industry consortium chartered to facilitate Web services interoperability and to accelerate Web services adoption in the marketplace. For more information: http://www.ws-i.org.

Just imagine you have a new data class that provides a disconnected, in-memory cache of data from a relational data store and you are sure nobody else has ever implemented this. Now your instances of this class to be used to pass data between Web services. If you have read this small articles series carefully, you might want to say that you just have implement the IXmlSerializable interface for this type.

Kenai Systems Inc. has introduced technology for testing Web services for security issues as the services are being developed. The Rocklin, Calif., company's ExamineST Web services security tool provides vulnerability assessment to test for security problems with Web services at their development phase, said Bill Kesselring, CEO of Kenai.

Microsoft Office 2003 is very tightly integrated with SharePoint by utilizing its Web services. Windows SharePoint Services comes with sixteen different Qeb services. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 supports an additional five Web services. The Web services provided by SharePoint do provide a vast array of features, but not all SharePoint features are accessible through them. If required, you can build your own Web service on top of SharePoint, thus leveraging the managed SharePoint server API itself. The Web service interfaces make it very easy to integrate SharePoint capabilities right into your application.

An XML Web Service is an internet standard and this article demonstrates how to build and consume an XML Web Service in Visual Basic .NET.

WS-Policy is becoming a crucial component of the Web services framework. It is likely that most Web services programmers will encounter the effects of Web service policy at some level. The newly updated public specification for WS-Policy briefly describes various policy processing models such as Normalization, Intersection and Merge. Learn the meaning of these architected operations and some of the implications and considerations that are not immediately obvious.

As I am currently writing some articles for a German magazine, it happend I had to draw a picture that shows the four phases involved in a schema-based contract-first Web services design process.

The W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group has released its first three Working Drafts for the Web Services Addressing specification, which provides transport-neutral mechanisms to address Web services and messages.

One of the most significant changes in the software industry has been the arrival of Web services (define), a truly distributed computing model in which applications "talk" to one another.

This sample application shows how to integrate .NET applications with non-.NET platforms. The application creates a custom Web Service proxy to handle the situation where the SOAP envelope must be created from scratch rather than through an auto-generated proxy created in VS.NET or with WSDL.exe. The sample code shows how to construct the SOAP envelope, send it to a PHP Web Service, and retrieve and parse the response SOAP envelope.

A Visual Studio .NET Add-In and Command Line Tool for Improved “Contract-First” Web services Design and Programming

There has been a lot of buzz around schema-based contract-first Web services design & development lately. Nearly everybody thinks that it is a good thing, and that we finally should reach a state where we all can live and breath it. But most people have been complaining about the lack of tool support for the so called 'first step'. We have two big steps involved:

Don and Dare have been posting on versioning web service endpoints. Don favors versioning with a single parameter, while Dare favors multiple parameters. I agree with Don.

A lot of people have asked me recently when I am going to release-to-web the next version of DynWsLib. DynWsLib is a quite successful (see version 1.4) .NET library to call Web services dynamically at runtime without having a static proxy implementation.

Web services technology is bringing harmony to the Internet's chaotic collection of databases.

Max shows how legacy VB6 applications can consume web services written in C++.

A lot of postings I've seen in the last week follow nicely on a "Web Services War Stories" session I saw at Foo Camp, suggesting that Web Services, while still important for some groups of developers, may have lost their broader promise.