API/Web Service Creation Basics

I've been handed some documentation about an API and been told to integrate it (the API uses SOAP). I'm familiar with web services and how they work, but I've never built a functional one. That is to say, I can create a basic web method in C# but I've never written开发者_Go百科 anything to connect to an external system.

I've read parts of books and I've not been able to find a good example about how to connect to and use a third-party API. I guess my question would be "how can I use this API with our systems?" Any help would be greatly appreciated, even if it's just pointing me to some good tutorials.

Basically you can just add a Web Reference to the API ('Add Service Reference' or 'Add Web Reference' depending on your version of Studio).

From there Studio will download the information it needs to build a proxy class which you can reference and use just like any object in your system.

var RemoteService = new RemoteAPI.APIMethods();
var result = RemoteService.Method1(foo, bar);

Here's a pretty good place to start for ASP.NET web services.

If you're using .NET 3.0 or higher, I suggest using WCF. If you decide to go that route, I highly suggest this book.

Here's a breakdown of Comparing ASP.NET Web Services to WCF Based on Development.

Hope that helps to get you started.