XML Web service discovery is the process of locating, or discovering, one or more related documents that describe available XML Web services. It is through XML Web services discovery that XML Web service clients learn about the available XML Web services at a given URL and how to use them. XML Web services discovery works from the premise that you have already obtained the URL to a discovery document, possibly through a directory service, such as http://uddi.microsoft.com, however, you do not have the details about the XML Web services offered. Through XML Web services discovery, you can discover the details about the XML Web services listed in a System.Web.Services.Discovery.DiscoveryDocument at a specific URL.

An XML Web service client starts XML Web services discovery by supplying a URL to either the DiscoveryClientProtocol.Discover(string) or DiscoveryClientProtocol.DiscoverAny(string) methods. Typically, this URL refers to a discovery document, which in turn refers to documents that describe one or more XML Web services, which are added to the DiscoveryClientProtocol.References property. At that point, only that document is downloaded and verified to point to valid information about XML Web services. However, the references contained in that document are not verified at this stage. Instead they are added to the DiscoveryClientProtocol.References property. To verify that the references are valid, invoke the DiscoveryClientProtocol.ResolveAll or DiscoveryClientProtocol.ResolveOneLevel methods, which add valid referenced documents to the DiscoveryClientProtocol.Documents property. Last, if a client wants to save the discovery results to disk, invoke the DiscoveryClientProtocol.WriteAll(string, string) method.

If programmatic access to XML Web services discovery is not needed, the winsdklong ships the Web Services Discovery tool (Disco.exe) for discovering XML Web services within a command prompt. For more details, see [<topic://cpgrfwebservicesdiscoverytooldiscoexe>].

Namespace: System.Web.Services.Discovery
Assembly: System.Web.Services (in System.Web.Services.dll)
Assembly Versions: 1.0.5000.0, 2.0.0.0