>Hi All
>After great suffering, i got a web service to work, only to get straight into another wall: firewalls, proxies and the like. Now, my web service does not work from outside the network the server resides in, or just throws me some 'incorrect number of parameters' errors, sometimes from inside the network, sometimes from outside. All of this, after removing and installing soap toolkit 2 sp2, mingling with the isapi stuff ( adding wsdl in the server and having it point to the correct isap.dll file, etc... ), but still no success.
>Since my app is mission-critical, i cannot release a part of code that is not stable, and is solid enough for me to trust it, wich brings me to the question: where do i have to look in order to achieve the simplest of the COM scenarios? IOW, i have a com dll i wrote in VFP. I would like external apps to access it through the internet. I would like to just get rid of IIS, and on my application server put an app waiting with a Winsock connection, at a predefined port, and just get the requests from either vfp client apps or asp pages, do its processing job, and return something back. How difficult can this be?
>

Hi Jaime,

First of all, I would suggest checking your WSDL and ASP listener files. I had problems accessing a web service from the outside world because these contained a local address (localhost). When I changed them to the IP address the internet sees, the web service worked as expected. As far as parameters, you may need to make sure they are typed correctly (ie. Local lnPar as int).

You could achieve what you want with COM, by opening up the appropriate ports for DCOM/COM+, but you would no longer be stateless. Also, many IT departments have resisted opening up these ports due to security concerns. This is one of the main "selling" points of web services, since everything goes through the http port.