Web services are built on SOAP, an XML based protocol that establishes the form that messages between web service consumers and providers should take. Traditionally, the consuming application developer would build a SOAP message manually and send it to the server, which would subsequently respond with its answer, again formatted as a SOAP message. The requirement to understand SOAP hindered the adoption of web services. To combat this, the .NET framework can wrap a lot of complexity - to the extent that a developer doesn t have to know the underlying structure of the messages at all. In fact, visual Studio makes the web service consumption process even easier, but not everyone has access to this. Thus I decided to write an example where we just used the command line tools provided as part of the free SDK, with the additional benefit that this way, you can learn a little more about what is taking place under the hood! -Web services are built on SOAP, an XML based protocol that establishes the form that messages between web service consumers and providers should take. Traditionally, the consuming application developer would build a SOAP message manually and send it to the server, which would subsequently respond with its answer, again formatted as a SOAP message. The requirement to understand SOAP hindered the adoption of web services. To combat this, the .NET framework can wrap a lot of complexity- to the extent that a developer doesn t have to know the underlying structure of the messages at all. In fact, visual Studio makes the web service consumption process even easier, but not everyone has access to this. Thus I decided to write an example where we just used the command line tools provided as part of the free SDK, with the additional benefit that this way, you can learn a little more about what is taking place under the hood!