Proxies and firewalls are two different things. A proxy is an outgoing interface and that's something that your company or provider sets up. No matter what you do you have to go through that setup to get out. You may or may not have a proxy.

A firewall works against incoming traffic and it depends on how the firewall is configured. A firewall that allows port 80/443 through will allow Web Services through (unless special settings are made to filter traffic)...

Web Services are nothing like the hassles you have to go through with DCOM. If you have ever set up a DCOM connection over the Internet you'll know what I'm talking about... Web Services pick a fixed and known port. DCOM dynamically tries to scan for available ports which will invariably fail with a firewall.

+++ Rick ---

>Alan,
>
>So it appears that the statement "Unlike DCOM, Web Services can be easily accessed through firewalls and provide truly loosely coupled applications." [MSDN News, pp 13, September/October 2001] is little bit off.
>
>Glad you got it working though.
>
>Jim
>
>>>>Evan you can try the following:
>>>>lo = CREATEOBJECT('mssoap.soapclient')
>>>>lo.mssoapinit('your wsdl location')
>>>>lo.ConnectorProperty("UseProxy") = .t.
>>>
>>>That worked. Thanks.
>>>
>>>Alan, James and Antonio pardon the CC, but I though you guys would be interested.
>>
>>Hey Evan,
>>
>>Thanks again for the info - I was finally able to get the Web Services demo up and running in time for our annual "IT Users Conference" - where we demo our suite of products to our customers.
>>
>>Althought none of our products use Web Services (not yet, anyway), I wanted to take five minutes and show the attendees what Web Services is all about so I was glad to get my demo working.
>>
>>The Shakespere Insult Generator web service was a big hit! If there is anything I've learned by attending conferences myself is that a bit of well-placed humor keeps the people interested in what you have to say.