Web Services signal a new era of lightweight distributed application development. While Web Services are not intended nor do they have the power to solve every distributed application problem, they are an easy way to create and consume services over the Internet. One of the design goals for Web Services is to allow companies and developers to share services with other companies in a simple way over the Internet.

"Web Services lower the barrier for small companies and make large companies more agile." says Mike Amundsen, President of EraServer.NET, a .NET hosting and XML Web Service provider.

And although interoperability issues are still being worked out, Web Services show strong indications of cross-platform, cross-language compatibility. In this article, we will explain how to create and consume Web Services using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the VB .NET language. Throughout this article, when we say Web Services, we'll typically mean Web Services created and consumed in the Microsoft environment. For our story, we used both Release Candidate 3 and the final version that was released on February 13th at the "VSLive!" event in San Francisco. This article will explain the benefits and drawbacks of Web Services, delve into the underlying technology, and provide practical how-to advice on using Web Services in the Microsoft environment. We tried to go deeper than other articles we've seen to provide answers to some of the difficult questions. In total, we think you will like using Web Services in the Visual Studio .NET IDE environment once you understand a few of its limitations. (Note that this is the first of a four-part series.)