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Programming WCF Services is the authoritative, bestselling guide to Microsoft's unified platform for developing modern service-oriented applications on Windows. Hailed as the definitive treatment of WCF, this book provides unique insight, rather than documentation, to help you learn the topics and skills you need for building WCF-based applications that are maintainable, extensible, and reusable.

Author Juval Löwy -- one of the world's top .NET experts -- revised this edition to include the newest productivity-enhancing features of .NET Framework 4 and the Azure AppFabric Service Bus, as well as the latest WCF ideas and techniques. By teaching you the why and the how of WCF programming, Programming WCF Services will help you master WCF and make you a better software engineer.

• Learn about WCF architecture and essential building blocks, including key concepts such as reliability and transport sessions
• Use built-in features such as service hosting, instance and concurrency management, transactions, disconnected queued calls, security, and discovery
• Master the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus, the most revolutionary piece of the new cloud computing initiative
• Increase your productivity and the quality of your WCF services by taking advantage of relevant design options, tips, and best practices in Löwy's ServiceModelEx framework
• Discover the rationale behind particular design decisions, and delve into rarely understood aspects of WCF development

"If you choose to learn WCF, you've chosen well. If you choose to learn with the resource and guidance of Juval Löwy, you've done even better... there are few people alive today who know WCF as well."
--Ron Jacobs, Senior Technical Evangelist for WCF, Microsoft Corporation

“Explaining the intersection of these two worlds--service-orientation and .NET technologies--is exactly what this book does. Its team of specialist authors provides a concrete, usable guide to this combination, ranging from the fundamentals of service-orientation to the more rarified air of .NET services in the cloud and beyond. If you’re creating service-oriented software on the Microsoft platform--that is, if you’re a serious .NET developer--mastering these ideas is a must.”

--From the Foreword by David Chappell, Chappell & Associates

“Microsoft’s diverse product line has long supported the service-oriented enterprise, but putting it all together into a cohesive whole can be daunting. From more established products, like Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and BizTalk Server, to newer offerings like Windows Azure and AppFabric, the experts assembled here expose the sweet spots for each technology, talk through the high-level trade-offs, and offer a roadmap to a unified Microsoft SOA story.”

--Kevin P. Davis, Ph.D., Software Architect

“This book excels in giving hands-on and in-depth expertise on the SOA architecture style with the .NET framework and the Azure cloud platform. It’s a practical guide for developers, architects, and SOA implementers. A must read!”

--Ricardo P. Schluter, ICT Architect, Parnassia Bavo Group

“While the industry overall may have hyped ‘the cloud’ to the level it often seems to cure world hunger, SOA with .NET and Windows Azure helps cut through the questions and hype and more clearly discusses the benefits and practical techniques for putting it to work in the real world. This book helps you understand the benefits associated with SOA and cloud computing, and also the techniques for connecting your current IT assets with new composite applications and data running in the cloud. This book will help you understand modern middleware technologies and harness the benefits of the cloud both on and off premises.”

--Burley Kawasaki, Director of Product Management, Microsoft

“The authors have a combined SOA and .NET experience of several decades–which becomes obvious when reading this book. They don’t just lead you down one path with a single descriptive solution. Instead, the sometimes nasty trade-offs that architects face in their design decisions are addressed. These are then mapped to the Microsoft .NET platform with clear code examples. A very refreshing look at this major contender in the SOA space and a definite must for the .NET SOA practitioner!”

--Dr. Thomas Rischbeck, IT Architect, Innovation Process Technology

“In order to evolve as a software craftsman one must read excellent books that will help you grow and evolve in your profession. One of those books that every software craftsmen interested in good design and best practices should read is SOA with .NET and Windows Azure. With this book, you will learn which design patterns will provide the best solution for the kinds of software design problems you, as a developer or designer, face every day. This book has everything that software architects, software designers, and programmers need to know when building great quality software with Microsoft technologies.

“This will undoubtedly be one of those books that you reference repeatedly when starting new SOA projects. There is plenty of information that even those not working with typical service-oriented architecture will find very useful. With plenty of real-life examples (code, design, and modeling), readers see in a practical manner how they could use SOA patterns to solve everyday software problems and be more productive. SOA with .NET and Windows Azure will fit in my top three books and will definitely be one of those that I will use in my everyday work.”

--Arman Kurtagic, Consultant at Omegapoint AB

The Authoritative Guide to Building Service-Oriented Solutions with Microsoft .NET Technologies and the Windows Azure Cloud Computing Platform

In SOA with .NET and Windows Azure, top Microsoft technology experts team up with Thomas Erl to explore service-oriented computing with Microsoft’s latest .NET service technologies and Windows Azure innovations.

The authors provide comprehensive documentation of on-premise and cloud-based modern service technology advancements within the Microsoft platform and further show how these technologies have increased the potential for applying and realizing service-orientation practices and goals.

Specifically, the book delves into Microsoft enterprise technologies, such as:

• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Windows Azure
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• Windows Azure AppFabric
• BizTalk Server
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

...as well as industry service mediums, including WS-* and REST, and many related service industry standards and technologies.

The book steps through common SOA design patterns and service-orientation principles, along with numerous code-level examples that further detail various technology architectures and implementations.

Topic Areas

This book covers the following primary topics:

• Microsoft Service Technologies
• Microsoft Enterprise Technologies
• On-Premise & Cloud-Based Service Topics
• Industry Service Technologies & Mediums
• Service-Oriented Technology Architectural Models
• Service-Orientation Design Paradigm
• Service-Orientation Design Principles
• SOA Design Patterns

About the Web Sites

This book series is further supported by a series of resources sites, including:

• www.soabooks.com
• www.soaspecs.com
• www.soamag.com
• www.serviceorientation.com
• www.soapatterns.org
• www.soaprinciples.com
• www.whatissoa.com

Description: 25-Word Description Hard-won, real-world knowledge for building world-class ASP.NET applications--based on the experiences of Microsoft developers who have worked with ASP.NET and Microsoft .NET for years. 75-Word Description Being at the forefront of developers working with ASP.NET is exciting, but coming up with coding solutions for the infinite opportunities ASP.NET offers can be a challenge. This in-depth technical tutorial--based on the hard-won experiences of Microsoft developers who have spent years working with ASP.NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework--provides ASP.NET developers with a wealth of concrete ideas on writing better ASP.NET code, faster. Full of inside tips and solid technical insights from the developers who have worked with ASP.NET the longest, this is the ideal resource for developers who want to take their ASP.NET applications to the next level of functionality. Positioning Statement: Get the coding strategies developers at Microsoft use to build great ASP.NET applications--with advice and reusable code samples straight from the source.

This book was written to introduce you to the features and capabilities that ASP.NET 3.5 offers, as well as to give you an explanation of the foundation that ASP.NET provides. We assume you have a general understanding of Web technologies, such as previous versions of ASP.NET, Active Server Pages 2.0/3.0, or JavaServer Pages. If you understand the basics of Web programming, you should not have much trouble following along with this book's content.

If you are brand new to ASP.NET, be sure to check out Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB by Imar Spaanjaars (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2008) to help you understand the basics.

In addition to working with Web technologies, we also assume that you understand basic programming constructs, such as variables, For Each loops, and object-oriented programming.

You may also be wondering whether this book is for the Visual Basic developer or the C# developer. We are happy to say that it is for both! When the code differs substantially, this book provides examples in both VB and C#.

This book spends its time reviewing the 3.5 release of ASP.NET. Each major new feature included in ASP.NET 3.5 is covered in detail. The following list tells you something about the content of each chapter.

• Chapter 1, "Application and Page Frameworks." This chapter shows you how to build ASP.NET applications using IIS or the built-in Web server that comes with Visual Studio 2008. This chapter also shows you the folders and files that are part of ASP.NET. It discusses ways to compile code and shows you how to perform cross-page posting. This chapter ends by showing you easy ways to deal with your classes from within Visual Studio 2008.

• Chapters 2, 3, and 4.These three chapters are grouped here because they all deal with server controls. This batch of chapters starts by examining the idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development. In addition to looking at the server control framework, these chapters delve into the plethora of server controls that are at your disposal for ASP.NET development projects.

• Chapter 5, "Working with Master Pages."Master pages are a great capability found in ASP.NET. They provide a means of creating templated pages that enable you to work with the entire application, as opposed to single pages.

• Chapter 6, "Themes and Skins.” This chapter looks at how to deal with the styles that your applications require and shows you how to create a centrally managed look-and-feel for all the pages of your application by using themes and the skin files that are part of a theme.

• Chapter 7, "Data Binding in ASP.NET 3.5.” One of the more important tasks of ASP.NET is presenting data, and this chapter shows you how to do that with ASP.NET controls.

• Chapter 8, "Data Management with ADO.NET.” This chapter presents the ADO.NET data model provided by ASP.NET, which allows you to handle the retrieval, updating, and deleting of data quickly and logically.

• Chapter 9, "Querying with LINQ." LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. This chapter introduces you to LINQ and how to use this new feature in web applications today.

• Chapter 10, "Working with XML and LINQ to XML." This chapter looks at the XML technologies built into ASP.NET and the underlying .NET Framework to help you easily extract, create, manipulate, and store XML..

• Chapter 11, "IIS7." Probably the most substantial release of IIS in its history, IIS 7.0 will change the way you host and work with your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 12, "Introduction to the Provider Model." A number of systems are built into ASP.NET that make the lives of developers so much easier and more productive than ever before. These systems are built upon an architecture called a provider model, which is rather extensible. This chapter gives an overview of this provider model and how it is used throughout ASP.NET 3.5.

• Chapter 13, "Extending the Provider Model." This chapter looks at some of the ways to extend the provider model found in ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter also reviews a couple of sample extensions to the provider model.

• Chapter 14, "Site Navigation." Many developers do not simply develop single pages—they build applications. One of the application capabilities provided by ASP.NET 3.5 is the site navigation system covered in this chapter.

• Chapter 15, "Personalization.". The ASP.NET team developed a way to store end user information—the ASP.NET personalization system.

• Chapter 16, "Membership and Role Management." This chapter covers the membership and role management system developed to simplify adding authentication and authorization to your ASP.NET applications. This chapter focuses on using the web.config file for controlling how these systems are applied, as well as on the server controls that work with the underlying systems.

• Chapter 17, "Portal Frameworks and Web Parts." This chapter explains Web Parts—a way of encapsulating pages into smaller and more manageable objects.

• Chapter 18, "HTML and CSS Design with ASP.NET." A lot of focus on building a CSS-based Web application was placed on Visual Studio 2008. This chapter takes a close look at how you can effectively work with HTML and CSS design for your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 19, "ASP.NET AJAX."AJAX signifies the capability to build applications that make use of the XMLHttpRequest object. New to Visual Studio 2008 is the ability to build AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications from the default install of the IDE.

• Chapter 20, "ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit." This chapter takes a good look at the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, a series of new controls that are now available to make AJAX web development rather simple.

• Chapter 21, "Security." This security chapter discusses security beyond the membership and role management features provided by ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter provides an in-depth look at the authentication and authorization mechanics inherent in the ASP.NET technology, as well as HTTP access types and impersonations.

• Chapter 22, "State Management." Because ASP.NET is a request-response–based technology, state management and the performance of requests and responses take on significant importance. This chapter introduces these two separate but important areas of ASP.NET development.

• Chapter 23 , "Caching." Because of the request-response nature of ASP.NET, caching on the server becomes important to the performance of your ASP.NET applications. This chapter looks at some of the advanced caching capabilities provided by ASP.NET, including the SQL cache invalidation feature which is part of ASP.NET 3.5.

• Chapter 24, "Debugging and Error Handling." This chapter tells you how to properly structure error handling within your applications. It also shows you how to use various debugging techniques to find errors that your applications might contain.

• Chapter 25, "File I/O and Streams." More often than not, you want your ASP.NET applications to work with items that are outside the base application. This chapter takes a close look at working with various file types and streams that might come into your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 26, "User and Server Controls." This chapter describes building your own server controls and how to use them within your applications.

• Chapter 27, "Modules and Handlers." This chapter looks at two methods of manipulating the way ASP.NET processes HTTP requests: HttpModule and HttpHandler. Each method provides a unique level of access to the underlying processing of ASP.NET and can be powerful tools for creating web applications.

• Chapter 28, "Using Business Objects." You are going to have components created with previous technologies that you do not want to rebuild but that you do want to integrate into new ASP.NET applications. Beyond showing you how to integrate your COM components into your applications, this chapter shows you how to build newer style .NET components instead of turning to the previous COM component architecture.

• Chapter 29, "Building and Consuming Services." This chapter reveals the ease not only of building XML Web services, but consuming them in an ASP.NET application. This chapter then ventures further by describing how to build XML Web services that utilize SOAP headers and how to consume this particular type of service.

• Chapter 30, "Localization." ASP.NET provides an outstanding way to address the internationalization of Web applications. This chapter looks at some of the important items to consider when building your Web applications for the world.

• Chapter 31, "Configuration." This chapter teaches you to modify the capabilities and behaviors of ASP.NET using the various configuration files at your disposal.

• Chapter 32, "Instrumentation." The ASP.NET framework includes performance counters, the capability to work with the Windows Event Tracing system, possibilities for application tracing , and the most exciting part of this discussion—a health monitoring system that allows you to log a number of different events over an application's lifetime.

• Chapter 33, "Administration and Management." This chapter provides an overview of the new GUI tools that come with APS.NET that enable you to manage your Web applications easily and effectively.

• Chapter 34, "Packaging and Deploying ASP.NET Applications." This chapter takes the application building process one-step further and shows you how to package your ASP.NET applications for easy deployment.

• Appendix A, "Migrating Older ASP.NET Projects." This appendix focuses on migrating ASP.NET 1.x, or 2.0 applications to the 3.5 framework.

• Appendix B, "ASP.NET Ultimate Tools." Based on Scott Hanse...

This book was written to introduce you to the features and capabilities that ASP.NET 4 offers, as well as to give you an explanation of the foundation that ASP.NET provides. We assume you have a general understanding of Web technologies, such as previous versions of ASP.NET, Active Server Pages 2.0/3.0, or JavaServer Pages. If you understand the basics of Web programming, you should not have much trouble following along with this book's content.

If you are brand new to ASP.NET, be sure to check out Beginning ASP.NET 4: In C# and VB by Imar Spaanjaars (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2010) to help you understand the basics.

In addition to working with Web technologies, we also assume that you understand basic programming constructs, such as variables, For Each loops, and object-oriented programming.

You may also be wondering whether this book is for the Visual Basic developer or the C# developer. We are happy to say that it is for both! When the code differs substantially, this book provides examples in both VB and C#.

This book explores the 4 release of ASP.NET. It covers each major new feature included in ASP.NET 4 in detail. The following list tells you something about the content of each chapter.

• Chapter 1, ″Application and Page Frameworks.″ The first chapter covers the frameworks of ASP.NET applications as well as the structure and frameworks provided for single ASP.NET pages. This chapter shows you how to build ASP.NET applications using IIS or the built-in Web server that comes with Visual Studio 2010. This chapter also shows you the folders and files that are part of ASP.NET. It discusses ways to compile code and shows you how to perform cross-page posting. This chapter ends by showing you easy ways to deal with your classes from within Visual Studio 2010.

• Chapters 2, 3, and 4. These three chapters are grouped together because they all deal with server controls. This batch of chapters starts by examining the idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development. In addition to looking at the server control framework, these chapters delve into the plethora of server controls that are at your disposal for ASP.NET development projects. Chapter 2, ″ASP.NET Server Controls and Client-Side Scripts,″ looks at the basics of working with server controls. Chapter 3, ″ASP.NET Web Server Controls,″ covers the controls that have been part of the ASP.NET technology since its initial release and the controls that have been added in each of the ASP.NET releases. Chapter 4, ″Validation Server Controls,″ describes a special group of server controls: those for validation.

• Chapter 5, ″Working with Master Pages.″ Master pages provide a means of creating templated pages that enable you to work with the entire application, as opposed to single pages. This chapter examines the creation of these templates and how to apply them to your content pages throughout an ASP.NET application.

• Chapter 6, ″Themes and Skins.″ The Cascading Style Sheet files you are allowed to use in ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 are simply not adequate in many regards, especially in the area of server controls. This chapter looks at how to deal with the styles that your applications require and shows you how to create a centrally managed look-and-feel for all the pages of your application by using themes and the skin files that are part of a theme.

• Chapter 7, ″Data Binding.″ One of the more important tasks of ASP.NET is presenting data, and this chapter looks at the underlying capabilities that enable you to work with the data programmatically before issuing the data to a control.

• Chapter 8, ″Data Management with ADO.NET.″ This chapter presents the ADO.NET data model provided by ASP.NET, which allows you to handle the retrieval, updating, and deleting of data quickly and logically.

• Chapter 9, ″Querying with LINQ.″ The.NET Framework 4 includes a nice access model language called LINQ. LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. This chapter introduces you to LINQ and how to effectively use this feature in your Web applications today.

• Chapter 10, ″Working with XML and LINQ to XML.″ The .NET Framework and ASP.NET 4 have many capabilities built into their frameworks that enable you to easily extract, create, manipulate, and store XML. This chapter takes a close look at the XML technologies built into ASP.NET and the underlying .NET Framework.

• Chapter 11, ″Introduction to the Provider Model.″ The provider model is built into ASP.NET to make the lives of developers so much easier and more productive than ever before. This chapter gives an overview of this provider model and how it is used throughout ASP.NET 4.

• Chapter 12, ″Extending the Provider Model.″ After an introduction of the provider model, this chapter looks at some of the ways to extend the provider model found in ASP.NET 4. This chapter also reviews a couple of sample extensions to the provider model.

• Chapter 13, ″Site Navigation.″ Most developers do not simply develop single pages—they build applications. One of the application capabilities provided by ASP.NET 4 is the site navigation system covered in this chapter.

• Chapter 14, ″Personalization.″ Developers are always looking for ways to store information pertinent to the end user. After it is stored, this personalization data has to be persisted for future visits or for grabbing other pages within the same application. The ASP.NET team developed a way to store this information—the ASP.NET personalization system. The great thing about this system is that you configure the entire behavior of the system from the web.config file.

• Chapter 15, ″Membership and Role Management.″ This chapter covers the membership and role management system developed to simplify adding authentication and authorization to your ASP.NET applications. This chapter focuses on using the web.config file for controlling how these systems are applied, as well as on the server controls that work with the underlying systems.

• Chapter 16, ″Portal Frameworks and Web Parts.″ This chapter explains Web Parts—a way of encapsulating pages into smaller and more manageable objects.

• Chapter 17, ″HTML and CSS Design with ASP.NET.″ Visual Studio 2010 places a lot of focus on building a CSS-based Web. This chapter takes a close look at how you can effectively work with HTML and CSS design for your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 18, ″ASP.NET AJAX.″ AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In Web application development, it signifies the capability to build applications that make use of the XMLHttpRequest object. Visual Studio 2010 contains the ability to build AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications from the default install of the IDE. This chapter takes a look at this way to build your applications.

• Chapter 19, ″ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.″ Along with the capabilities to build ASP.NET applications that make use of the AJAX technology, a series of controls is available to make the task rather simple. This chapter takes a good look at the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and how to use this toolkit with your applications today.

• Chapter 20, ″Security.″ This chapter discusses security beyond the membership and role management features provided by ASP.NET 4. This chapter provides an in-depth look at the authentication and authorization mechanics inherent in the ASP.NET technology, as well as HTTP access types and impersonations.

• Chapter 21, ″State Management.″ Because ASP.NET is a request-response–based technology, state management and the performance of requests and responses take on significant importance. This chapter introduces these two separate but important areas of ASP.NET development.

• Chapter 22, ″Caching.″ Because of the request-response nature of ASP.NET, caching (storing previous generated results, images, and pages) on the server becomes rather important to the performance of your ASP.NET applications. This chapter looks at some of the advanced caching capabilities provided by ASP.NET, including the SQL cache invalidation feature which is part of ASP.NET 4. This chapter also takes a look at object caching and object caching extensibility.

• Chapter 23, ″Debugging and Error Handling.″ This chapter tells you how to properly structure error handling within your applications. It also shows you how to use various debugging techniques to find errors that your applications might contain.

• Chapter 24, ″File I/O and Streams.″ This chapter takes a close look at working with various file types and streams that might come into your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 25, ″User and Server Controls.″ Not only can you use the plethora of server controls that come with ASP.NET, but you can also use the same framework these controls use and build your own. This chapter describes building your own server controls and how to use them within your applications.

• Chapter 26, ″Modules and Handlers.″ This chapter looks at two methods of manipulating the way ASP.NET processes HTTP requests: HttpModule and HttpHandler. Each method provides a unique level of access to the underlying processing of ASP.NET, and each can be a powerful tool for creating Web applications.

• Chapter 27, "ASP.NET MVC." ASP.NET MVC is the latest major addition to ASP.NET and has generated a lot of excitement from the development community. ASP.NET MVC supplies you with the means to create ASP.NET using the Model-View-Controller models that many developers expect. ASP.NET MVC provides developers with the testability, flexibility, an...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods, WS-FM 2008, held in Milan, Italy, in September 2008 in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2008.

The 13 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The papers feature topics such as analysis, test, and verification; choreographies and process calculi; transactions and interoperability; workflows and petri nets.

Build Web services with enterprise-class reliability, performance, and value. Web services are transforming IT, and represent a powerful new way to reduce cost and drive top-line growth throughout the enterprise. This book takes a no-nonsense view of architecting and constructing enterprise-class Web services and applications. The authors expertly assess the current state of the Web services platform, offering best practices and new architectural patterns for leveraging the advantages of Web services-and mitigating the risks. This work helps build Web services and applications that meet enterprise requirements for security, mobility, transactions, QoS, workflow, portlets, management, and more. It helps you avoid the "bottomless pit" of application rewriting and maintenance overhead, and architect applications to stay reliable even if some Web services go off-line. It features acale applications to support the inclusion of Web services from multiple partners, and secure private information within Web services environments. It helps you develop high-value mobile Web service applications, and includes a detailed case study. Whether you're an architect, developer, project leader, or manager, this book will help you deliver on the promise of Web services in your real-world enterprise environment.

Real-World .NET Applications consists of six significant .NET applications, each representing one of the major application types: Custom Windows Control, XML Document Editor, a Pac-Man style game, UML Class Diagram Editor, FTP Client Application, and an ASP.NET online store. Each application or component is thoroughly documented, starting from teaching the underlying principles through the architecture and design, and finally the actual implementation of the application. With Real-World .NET Applications, developers can get started right away developing necessary applications.

Keep pace with evolving Web services specifications—and get developer-to-developer insights for using them to deliver advanced, interoperable solutions for Microsoft .NET. This guide provides a high-level overview of how these key specifications work and introduces Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0—Microsoft’s latest offering to support advanced Web services specifications, which integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Discover how to exploit WSE for advanced security, reliability, and transaction capabilities in your Web service applications. And get complete code for all the book’s examples on the Web, ready to adapt for your own solutions.

Use WSE 2.0 to implement the latest Web services specifications, including:

• WS-Security: Build core security features—including digital signatures, security tokens, and encryption—to help protect the Web services you write and consume
• WS-Trust: Issue, validate, exchange, and refresh security tokens in a Web services interaction
• WS-SecureConversation: Define security context for interactions involving a series of request-response messages
• WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment: Specify the requirements for accessing your Web services
• WS-Attachments and DIME: Send and receive SOAP messages with external attachments, including binary files and XML fragments