Alexandre,

The SOAP Protocol is not tied to a particular transport layer. Usually the transport is HTTP, but nothing in the SOAP spec says that you have to use HTTP to transport the actual SOAP message.

The idea is that you have a SOAP parser that can create and deparse SOAP messages and then you can ship this SOAP message anyway you want. A common alternative for SOAP messages are Message Queues for example. In .NET another protocol is the .NET remoting framework which can go either over HTTP or over plain TCP/IP sockets.

However, if you use the standard .NET implementation - .ASMX server and WebService client - you are bound by the HTTP transport layer that it uses. If you want to use other transports you have to go much more low level. You can manually create and parse the XML using XmlDocument and there are a few confusing low level Soap classes that I haven't played with <g>.

+++ Rick ---




>Hello all,
>
>One of our client is arguing that they have a .NET webservice that is being called from a Windows Form application without going through the SOAP protocol... the person doesn't know exactly how it is done but I've looked at the code and it looks to me that it's a standard WebService.. so it has to be called using SOAP...
>
>For me, WebService is automatically linked with SOAP... correct me if I'm mistaken...
>
>What do you think? Is it possible to have a "SOAP-less" WebService ?
>
>Thanks,
> Alex