Flex to .Net via Flex Data Services - Part One

This article, promised a long time ago, half done, has been lying in my documents folder for some time now, just collecting dust. I decided to get back at it and get this badboy blogged. Because of time constraints I'm just going to briefly skim over this first part. Those of you that are familiar with .Net webservices should find most of the code self explanatory.

A few things worthy of mention. I had a heck of time getting the .net webservice to work properly with Java Axis - it took a lot of tweaking the method attributes before it worked. My primary goal was to make sure my webservice was not passing back simply a collection of generic Objects, but rather a collection of say Employee Objects. Employee objects would also then be recognized as such by the Java client, which makes coding on the Java side somewhat easier.

You can find the code HERE. It's a zip file containing the webservice I will be using thoughout this series of articles. I've kept most of the default namespaces and left the code fairly simple. For this project I am using the Employees table in the Northwind databaes and am connecting using a trusted connection.

Please download the code and get the webservice up and running. In the next part I'll show you how to consume the webservice using a Java client.