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Dave Winer asks: Look at all the overhead. ... what are all those magic incantations about?
In that sample code, there are three lines of overhead. Having worked closely with a number of SOAP implementations, I can explain each.
- Since ASP.Net is designed to be language neutral, they needed a mechanism to determine the programming language and intended class name.
- I cover the reason why a namespace must be declared here.
- The final line deals with the issue of defaults. In many object oriented languages you may have methods which are public or private. In the web services world, there is a third choice: published. The default in ASP.Net is that methods are not published. From a security perspective, this default makes sense.