Mark Wilson I am the creator of TopXML. I am available for international and local (Australia) contracts. I am a Solution Architect/Business Analyst. I have worked in IT in several countries (NZ, Australia, South Africa, UK) building and training teams for government and very large non-governmental organizations. I am ex-Microsoft Consulting Services. I wrote the first book on Microsoft XML published in 2000 called XML Programming with VB and ASP. Most recently I have been building tools for the SEO industry. Ask me for a 37 point SEO health-checkup for your website.
SOAP,
the Simple Object Access Protocol, is an XML syntax for exchanging
messages. Because it is XML, it is both language and platform
independent. SOAP is a fundamental part of .NET, Microsoft's
new development platform, and it will be important for developers moving
to .NET to understand what SOAP is and how it works.
SOAP
was created
to solve the real-world problems of distributed applications. Key
contributions have come from Microsoft, DevelopMentor,
and UserLand. The
specification has grown over the past 2 years, and it is now on version
1.1 (click
here for the specification). The
SOAP specification has been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
which will help make SOAP a standard along the lines of HTTP or XML.
The
key to SOAP is its simplicity. It is trivial to build a basic SOAP
application using Visual Basic, one that can access SOAP endpoints written
in anything from C++ to Perl to XSLT. In this tutorial, I will show
you how to compose a SOAP message, send it via HTTP, and read the response
using Visual Basic. The SOAP endpoint we will access, TimeServer, runs on the TopXML server.
