DotNet Webservice

What is a Web Service in .NET?

A web service is a software component that exposes itself through the open communication channels of the Internet. Applications running on remote machines, on potentially different platforms, can access these components in a language and platform-independent manner. A Web Service is a group of functions, packaged together for use in a common framework throughout a network.

There are 4 types of authentications

1.WINDOWS AUTHENTICATION
2.FORMS AUTHENTICATION
3.PASSPORT AUTHENTICATION
4.NONE/CUSTOM AUTHENTICATION

The authentication option for the ASP.NET application is specified by using the tag in the Web.config file, as shown below:
other authentication options
1. WINDOWS AUTHENTICATION Schemes

• Integrated Windows authentication
• Basic and basic with SSL authentication
• Digest authentication
• Client Certificate authentication

2. FORMS AUTHENTICATION
You, as a Web application developer, are supposed to develop the Web page and authenticate the user by checking the provided user ID and password against some user database

3.PASSPORT AUTHENTICATION
A centralized service provided by Microsoft, offers a single logon point for clients. Unauthenticated users are redirected to the Passport site

4 NONE/CUSTOM AUTHENTICATION:
If we don’t want ASP.NET to perform any authentication, we can set the authentication mode to “none”. The reason behind this decision could be: We don’t want to authenticate our users, and our Web site is open for all to use. We want to provide our own custom authentication