Web services, SOAP and harness applications

[Tarun Mistry]

Hi all, im pretty new to .NET development and have some question I hope some
nice people here can help me with.

Just to point out im not new to programming, just .NET, as such some of the
concepts and libraries that are available for use may need to be clarified.

Ok, my problem.

I have a client ASP.NET site that will interact with a web service (that I
call my Harness).

The client needs to be able to send different SOAP messages to the harness,
and depending on the message that the harness receives, it needs to send a
SOAP message back to the client for the client to process.

So a simple example. On the web site you could fill out your address
details, this would make an XML SOAP file containing your address, this is
sent to the web service, the service gets it, sees you are sending an
address, returns your post code in a different XML SOAP message and then the
client display this post code to the user.

Now, my harness application is there to simply simulate a BizTalk machine,
so I dont want to hard code something that will make replacing it with a
BizTalk server impossible.

So, I have looked at web services, MSMQs and the HttpWebRequest and
HttpWebResponse methods and am really confused on how to go about this.

I would really love some help or clarification.

Many thanks,
Taz

[Tarun Mistry]

Just to clarify some what...

I would like to define a base set of messages, i.e. (i know these do not
represnt valid SOAP messages however its just to explain my point).

<send_sample>
<attribute1>TO_FILL_IN</attribute1>
</send_sample>

and

<return_sample>
<attribute1>TO_FILL_IN</attribute1>
</return_sample>

Now, depending on what is done on the ASP.NET page, one of the 2 templates
above will be picked up and the blancs filled in. This complete SOAP message
will then be sent to a harness/web service.

The web serivce will check to see if it is a "send_sample" message or a
"return_sample" message, depending on which it is it will return a SOAP
message with a value.

I am confused as to how to manually create my SOAP messages and transmit
them, secondly how to recieve them on the web service and process them.

PLEASE HELP :) Reading references would be great.
Taz