>What you're trying to do here can be done with global variables. In .NET Web Services you declare them at the class level (outside of any functions), you can initialize them in the constructor and then you can use them from any function. You would only need to expose them as properties if you needed to access them from other classes.

So far, I have this:

Public Class WebService
    Inherits System.Web.Services.WebService

    Private cUrl As String = "http://www.levelextreme.com"
    Private cUser As String = ""

    <WebMethod()> _
    Public Function HelloWorld(ByVal tcString As String) As String
        Return tcString + cUrl + cUser
    End Function

End Class

What surprises me is that I was not able to do this:

Public Class WebService
    Inherits System.Web.Services.WebService

    Private cUrl As String
    Private cUser As String

    cUrl="http://www.levelextreme.com"
    cUser=""

    <WebMethod()> _
    Public Function HelloWorld(ByVal tcString As String) As String
        Return tcString + cUrl + cUser
    End Function

End Class

Do you know why?