Web Service and Files

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bri189a

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Haven't had much of an opportunity to work with web services, so I'm venturing out and trying to get up to date. VS makes it so easy...not much of a learning curve at this point. Question though - returning primitives or class thas that can be serialized (DataSet) is simple enough, what if you want to return a file of some sort; like a picture, or a word document? I'm very curious about this part.

Also - anyone who has some beginner articles on how to get things into this directory that's out there floating somewhere - or do people even use that? Seems like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo weren't in it - but you go to there respective development sites and you can find it.

I see some really cool things in this; wish I would of started with them a year or two ago; but full time job takes it toll. Is it this easy to connect to web services not developed in .NET? Or for non .NET developers to connect to a .NET web service?
 
You could always return a byte array containing the contents of the document and leave it up to the client to decide what to do with the result (Save to disk, use internally etc.)

Web services are based on standards, if you follow the standards then any language / tool / platform can work with you, you can also work with web services developed in other languages just as easily.
 
I was thinking about the byte array thing - so load it into a stream and then output it to a buffer? I'll try and see where it goes. I'm also trying to find some security model guidelines - was suprised to see that it also supports session? Makes since I guess, but I didn't think that would be there. Lot to learn on this still... THanks PD.
 
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