What are ASP.NET Web Services?

ASP.NET Web services allow software developers to create an interface for their application that supports integration across application domains. ASP.NET Web services consist of one or more Web methods. Web methods are like methods of regular .NET objects, but are invoked over a network and executed on the server that hosts the Web service. This is similar to Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and DCOM object invocation.

When calling a Web method, parameters may be passed and any return value can be retrieved. As the method call is sent to the machine hosting the Web service using HTTP, the objects being passed as parameters are transformed into a format suitable for transmission. In this case, XML serialization is employed, which is the process of converting an object from its binary form in memory to HTTP-safe XML format.

We have chosen to use ASP.NET Web services to integrate InfoPath with MCMS as it allows us to use the robustness...