Hi Jim,
Are you planning on going to WhilFest? There will be a couple of sessions about Web Services that should be pretty informative. Gary DeWitt and Kevin McNeish both have presentations. I've seen bits and pieces of Gary's planned session and it looks pretty good to me. (Rick Strahl had a good presentation at DevCon last month also).
>However, based on the limited stuff that I've been able to read on the subject, I have fear that apparent overheads inherent in it make it unsuitable for use in a "traditional" VFP application. The only things that I know for sure, though, are that they must reside in a OS having IIS and that SOAP 2 is required.Well, I don't know what "apparent overhead" you may be talking about ... there is no reason what-so-ever that Web Services can't be incorporated into a VFP application ('course, I guess it depends on what you mean by "traditional"). But, anyway, that's just my opinion. < g >
Unfortunately, I can't really answer any of your questions about it as I've only played with it a very little bit. And I suggest you play with it too ... it's fun.
As time goes on, I'm sure we in the FoxPro community will be hearing a lot more about Web Services and VFP.
~~Bonnie