A Few Web Service Questions

[mercury529]

Hello everyone.

Currently the only version of Visual Studio I own is VS6. I have developed a Web Service using VC++ 6 and the Soap Toolkit 3 Microsoft deployed prior to the .NET Web Service support. It has since been deprecated.

I cannot afford to get a newer version of Visual Studio currently, so I am stuck for the moment using VS6. The client is a c++ application that connects via the low level connection technique described in the SOAP toolkit documentation. On the server side, I wrote a COM dll. The COM dll provides functionality for my web service. It exports multiple functions. The functions take BSTR, BSTR*, int, int*, and MSSOAPLib30::ISentAttachments** parameters, and are capable of modifying pointer parameters for BSTR, int, and MSSOAPLib30::ISentAttachments to return data back to the client. In order to get the SOAP request sent from the client to be processed on the server side, I used the WSDL generator provided by the SOAP Toolkit. I then setup the appropriate listener in IIS. The Web Service functions properly setup like this.

Here are my questions given the setup described above:
1.) Is there a better and free way to implement the stage where the incoming SOAP request is sent to the COM dll? Currently, I have to use the SOAP Toolkit (which is no longer receiving support) because I do not know of a free alternative. Is there an alternative that I do not have to pay for?

2.) Do other VS Web Service capabilities in newer versions of VS support overloaded functions? Do they support default parameters?

3.) Is there anything wrong with the technique I have described for implementing a web service? It seems to work well. My only complaint is that is uses a Toolkit that is no longer supported.

4.) How can I ensure the connection between the SOAP client and the SOAP server is secure (encrypted in such a way that sniffing will not reveal information)? I have heard that I can use an https address to force encryption of the message. Does this work? Will this work when attachments are involved? Will it prevent the ability for people to intercept and read the message (is the encryption strong, etc)?

Thank you for any help you can provide.

[Matt]

Do you have a working client/server with the current setup? What are your reasons for not using the SOAP Toolkit anymore? Just because it isn't supported doesn't mean it will stop working. Will you be distributing the client program and need it to work with newer software technologies? You may want to consider porting to Java and looking into current web service practices. You can get free development software for Java, but not as user friendly as VS.

Depending on what your goal is for the client software, I would recommend different solutions.

[mercury529]

Thanks for the reply Matt.

Currently the client/server works with my setup.

I have two main reasons for wanting to replace the SOAP toolkit. The first reason is while the program works fine now, that may not be the case later. Additional changes to my client or server might not work correctly with the Toolkit. Also, there is the chance that updates of the OS might break some component that the Toolkit was depending on. If there is no support, then I will be stuck. The second reason is the .NET implementation of the SOAP Web Service functionality should have speed benefits. These are not as important on the client side, but on the server, it would best if it processed the requests as quickly as possible.

As for porting to Java, it is not something I can do. Outside of the fact that my experience with Java is limited, the program is rather large and complex, and it would take me a very long time to port it over. It could also potentially suffer from the overhead of the VM.

The client software uses SOAP to communicate with a licensing and update server.

Thank you again for the post, and if you had any more input, I would very much appreciate it.

[danielmichel]

I apologize if this thread was lost as we have been making some changes to the forum structure.
Unfortunately I don't know much about programming.
I hope we can help you sometime soon if you have not found a solution to your problem already.