Cathi...

Thanks for responding. I think I understand your answer, but just so I'm clear (I'm new to .NET), I'll ask it again...

A food broker might work for four different food companies in different parts of the country, with four different Web sites. The food broker has a Winforms app that connects to any of the four food companies. Each of the four food companies has the same Data Broker Web Service behind their firewall, which takes requests for data from the WinForms app, and acts as an intermediary between the WinForms app and the corporate SQL Server.

When the food broker decides to connect to company 'A', so long as I store the URL in a config file, I can (at runtime) set the URL property of the instantiated data broker service to whatever it is for company 'A'?

(Only reason I want to make absolutely certain is that I have a developer who insists he read from Microsoft that the URL Web address for the Web Data Broker service had to be hard-coded at run-time. I think that would be horribly limiting, but wanted to make sure).

Thanks again,
Kevin