Microsoft recently released the Office XP Web Services Toolkit, which gives us a glimpse of how Office will fit into the .NET paradigm.

The Office XP Web Services Toolkit lets you discover and integrate Web services into Office XP solutions, such as Access, Great Plains, and Excel. From within the VBA editor, you can incorporate the open, standards-based .NET Web Services UDDI server to discover Web services, searching by keywords or businesses. This is the same service that's offered in Visual Studio.NET; it uses the same security model as well. You can then select the Web service to integrate into your application, using standard VBA classes that use the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 2.0. This technology leverages your existing VB skillset, plus current standards, such as UDDI and SOAP. The Office XP Web Services Toolkit only works with Office XP products -- specifically, any VBA 6.3 application.

Web Services Toolkit in action

There are several ways in which you can use this technology, such as incorporating real-time interest and exchange rates into your applications. You can also use Web services to track supplier inventory levels, as well as tax information and rates.

Anders Brown, lead product manager of the Microsoft Office Developer and Solutions Group, offers a real-world example of this technology:

"Imagine you've built a billing system in Access 2002. Often, sales tax would be something you'd have to calculate in your application, and perhaps you'd do that by including a table that had all the states and their corresponding sales tax percentage. This works fine, however, until the sales taxes change -- then you have to update all the deployments of your billing application."

Integrating a Web service into your application greatly simplifies this process. "If the sales tax percentage was available via a third-party XML Web service, you could integrate this XML Web service into your billing application and look to the Web service provider to provide the sales tax percentage. (You would pass it the state of interest; it would return the sales tax percentage via SOAP over HTTP). If the amounts change, the Web service always provides the most up-to-date information without having to do any updates to your applications. In essence, you've off-loaded that function to someone else and are communicating with it via the Internet. The Office XP Web Services Toolkit lets you build this type of application quickly and easily," says Brown.

.NET My Services are also XML Web services and can be accessed from your application. "You can create an Access 2002 solution that requests your Passport account, passes that data to the Passport Authentication XML Web service, then, once authenticated, exposes your contact, etc. via .NET My Services," Brown says.

Off to a good start

Although we still don't have a clear vision of what Microsoft Office.NET might be, Access developers can now be a part of the .NET world as an XML Web services consumer.One of the drawbacks to the technology is that it only works with Office XP technologies. If you're using Access 2000 or 97, you won't be able to take advantage the Office XP Web Services Toolkit. That leaves a great number of developers out of this picture. According to Brown, Microsoft has no plans to make the toolkit work with previous versions.

We'd like to hear from you. Share your experience with the Office XP Web Services Toolkit at AccessVBSQL@Advisor.com. Also, take advantage of Advisor Forums when you're developing. They give you a direct link to the developer community: http://Advisor.com/Forums.

Get ready for two Advisor DevCons in March!

Don't miss Access Advisor DevCon, and VB Advisor DevCon, March 4-6, 2002 in Los Angeles, California.

Access Advisor DevCon is the only all-Access developer conference. We're presenting your favorite technical experts sharing their wisdom and helping you build custom database solutions with Microsoft Access 2002, 2000, and 97.

VB Advisor DevCon offers focused sessions to help you advance your Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 programming skills. We'll also help you get your feet wet with VB.NET.

We're excited to be hosting these two conferences in the heart of Hollywood. The new Renaissance hotel is located in a dramatic new complex, Hollywood & Highland, which is also home to the new Kodak Theater where the Academy Awards will be hosted later in March.

See the conference brochures on pages 23 and 41, or go to http://Advisor.com/AdvisorEvents for complete details, including pre-conference seminars and post-conference workshops.