Publish service - Best practice

[Nic]

Hi,

I am looking to publish a service and is currently developing an API that I
intend to allow authenticated users to use. Having been away for a while
from programming, I understand that things have moved on with the release of
..Net 3.0 and I would like some advice on what current best practice would be
to do this.

1. I intend to use a Internet hosting provider to host my service, should I
use webmethods in .asmx files or are there better ways of doing this now ?
If possible I would like to have as few constrains as possible in terms of
software requirements for the consumer of my service, but would consider
narrowing this down to .Net only if there are significant benefits.

2. I would like to provide a subscriber with a username/password and
authenticate requests to my service, I believe this used to be done by
configuring IIS for basic authentication over SSL and passing credentials in
the HTTP Post. Is there a more clever way of doing this now ?

Any advice would be appreciated

Nic