ASP.NET Web Services & WCF Frequently Asked Questions

In this section I will try to cover the frequently asked questions about ASP.NET Web Services and Windows Communication Foundation. Again I would apologies for the questions to not be in proper sequence. Surely I would arrange the same into sequence when this section will have some significant amount of questions.
So, we start now…
Question 1 : What is the data format used by ASP.NET Web Services for communication?
Answer : XML

Question 2 : What do you mean by SOAP?
Answer : SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.
We know that ASP.NET Web services is platform independent. i.e. Web Services may be used for cross platform communication for example communication between an ASP.NET Web site running on Windows environment and a JSP Application running on Linux environment.
This simply means that there should be a standard or some common format which is used for communication. This standard is known as SOAP.

Question 3: What is the SOAP message format?
Answer : A SOAP message mainly contains Message Header and SOAP Envelope.

Header Contains the information about the message being transmitted e.g. Message Length, Host Server and Requested Service etc.




Question 4 : What do you mean WSDL?
Answer : WSDL Stands for Web Services Description Language.