Victoria,

We don't quite use Web Service the way that Keith has described. True, your Database access needs to be removed from your UI, as he says. But, we use our Web Services more as a wrapper for calls to server-side BizObject classes that call server-side DataAccess classes (and all our database stuff is in the DataAccess classes), so we've further compartmentalized our tiers. Everything passes Typed DataSets between the tiers. To and from the Web Services, the DataSets are serialized/de-serialized to XML.

But with a Web Application I don't think you need to call a Web Service to access your data, since everything takes place server side, it's redundant to get your data from the Web Service if you have DataAccess classes sitting server-side as well (if you've designed the Web Services as a wrapper, as we have). Any web pages that we use in our app (and we don't have many, it's mainly a WinForm app), we call our server-side components directly rather than through the Web Service. The WinForm part of the application utilizes the Web Service. But either way, the DataSets that get passed back and forth are the same.

I hope this gives you more food for thought ....

~~Bonnie

>I read a lot about the importance of web services and I created some such as validating user login, user application rights, ... etc.
>But I think that there's a lot more that I should do with web services.
>
>Any idea how can I utilize the web services?
>
>Our environment contains the followings :
>- SQL 2000
>- Client applications (.NET, VB6, VFP6, Access)
>- eProcurement System
>- eRecruitment (CV System)
>- Intranet