Web services allow processes to communicate by passing XML documents over well known ports and protocols (typically HTTP). The SOAP and WSDL recommendations promote features such as interoperability and loose coupling that enable web service clients and the services they access to be written in different languages and run on different platforms. For example, a Visual Basic® client running on Windows® can access a Java™ web service running on Linux™.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's new framework for building distributed systems. It unifies and builds on the diverse set of existing distribution mechanisms, which include ASP.NET Web services and .NET Remoting.

This category contains courseware that covers both ASP.NET Web services as well as Windows Communication Framework programming.

If you are looking for Visual Basic training materials specific to a different technology please consult one of the following Visual Basic courseware categories:

• Visual Basic Language
• Visual Basic and the .NET Framework
• ADO.NET and LINQ using Visual Basic
• ASP.NET and AJAX using Visual Basic
• Sharepoint using Visual Basic
• Silverlight using Visual Basic
• Testing with Visual Basic
• Windows Forms and WPF using Visual Basic
• Workflow using Visual Basic
• XML using Visual Basic