FREE IT Consulting Windows Internet Tech. If you want to provide a service from your servers that people can program against how would you do it. Well like everything else in ASP.NET, Microsoft has done it for you. Enter Web Services. ASP.NET files have a .aspx extension.
Web services have a .asmx extension.
The technologies are similar, but instead of outputting HTML, your service outputs a computer readable answer to the input it recieved. Well imagine if you wanted to validate a credit card. Until now you were stuck either using an ugly post routine to the clearing house's web site or you got a CD with their objects on it and loaded them on your machine. Imagine if you could point to their server and ask for a URL you could use as if it were a component. Well you can.