What Is .NET?

.NET is the Microsoft Web services strategy to connect information, people, systems, and devices through software. Integrated across the Microsoft platform, .NET technology provides the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions with Web services. .NET-connected solutions enable businesses to integrate their systems more rapidly and in a more agile manner and help them realize the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.

The Microsoft platform includes everything a business needs to develop and deploy a Web service-connected IT architecture: servers to host Web services, development tools to create them, applications to use them, and a worldwide network of more than 35,000 Microsoft Certified Partner organizations to provide any help you need. 

What Are Web Services?

If you ask a developer what Web services are, you'll hear something like, "self-describing software modules, semantically encapsulating discrete functionality, wrapped in and accessible via standard Internet communication protocols like XML and SOAP."

But if you ask a business leader who has implemented Web service-based solutions, you'll get a different kind of answer. You'll hear that Web services are an approach that helps the business connect with its customers, partners, and employees. They enable the business to extend existing services to new customers. They help the business work more efficiently with its partners and suppliers. They unlock information so it can flow to every employee who needs it. They reduce development time and expense for new projects. You'll hear less about what Web services are and more about what they enable the business to do.

Benefits of Web Services

By enabling applications to share data across different hardware platforms and operating systems, Web services provide many benefits, including:

•	Opening the door to new business opportunities by making it easy to connect with partners.
•	Delivering dramatically more personal, integrated experiences to users through the new breed of smart devices—including PCs.
•	Saving time and money by cutting development time.
•	Increasing revenue streams by enabling businesses to easily make their own Web services available to others.

Connecting Applications Through Web Services

Web services are revolutionizing how applications talk to other applications—or, more broadly, how computers talk to other computers—by providing a universal data format that lets data be easily adapted or transformed. Based on XML, the universal language of Internet data exchange, Web services can communicate across platforms and operating systems, regardless of the programming language in which the applications are written.

Each Web service is a discrete unit of code that handles a limited set of tasks. However, although Web services remain independent of each other, they can loosely link themselves into a collaborating group that performs a particular task.

Example: Your Inventory System

Say you have a stand-alone inventory system. If you don't connect it to anything else, it's not as valuable as it could be. The system can track inventory, but not much more. You may have to enter inventory information twice—once in your accounting system and once in your customer relationship management system. The inventory system may be unable to automatically place orders to suppliers. The benefits of such an inventory system are diminished by high overhead costs.

However, if you connect your inventory system to your accounting system, it gets more interesting. Now, whenever you buy or sell something, the implications for your inventory and your cash flow can be tracked in one step. If you go further, and connect your warehouse management system, customer ordering system, supplier ordering systems, and your shipping company, suddenly that inventory management system is worth a lot. You can do end-to-end management of your business while dealing with each transaction only once, instead of once for every system it affects. That's a lot less work—and a lot less opportunity for errors.

These connections can be made easily using Web services. Web services allow the applications to share information through the Internet, regardless of the operating system or back-end software that the application is using.

Web Services Use Industry-Standard Protocols

Web services also make it possible for developers to choose between building all pieces of their applications, or consuming (using) Web services created by others. This means that an individual company doesn't have to supply every piece for a complete solution. The ability to expose (announce and offer) your own Web services creates new revenue streams for your company.

Web services are invoked over the Internet by means of industry-standard protocols including SOAP; XML; and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). They are defined through public standards organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

SOAP is an XML-based messaging technology standardized by the W3C, which specifies all the necessary rules for locating Web services, integrating them into applications, and communicating between them. UDDI is a public registry, offered at no cost, where one can publish and inquire about Web services.