Kevin,

You can access the web reference directly, as in Viv's example, but we use a Web Service factory class for one simple reason:

When you add a web reference to your project, the actual URL to that reference gets stored. At runtime, you may have a need to change that to something else (something you may have stored in a config file perhaps). When you instantiate the Web Service via a factory class, you can set the URL at runtime.

public class WebServiceFactory
{
	// the default URL
	private static string m_url = "http://localhost/webservices.myapp/";

	public static SoapHttpClientProtocol GetWebService(SoapHttpClientProtocol ws)
	{
		string url    = ws.Url.ToLower();
		string newurl = this.MyMethodToGetURLFromConfig();
		if (newurl.Length == 0 || newurl.ToLower().Trim() == m_url)
		{
			return ws;
		}
		else
		{
			ws.Url = url.Replace(m_url, newurl);
			return ws;
		}
	}

And you use it like this:

// declaration
private MyApp.PersonnelWS.Personnel oWS;

// instantiation
this.oWS  = (MyApp.PersonnelWS.Personnel)WebServiceFactory.GetWebService(new MyApp.PersonnelWS.Personnel());

// use as any other class method call
string XML = this.oWS.GetPersonnel(MyKey);

~~Bonnie