ASP.NET Web Services (first impression)

Implementing Microsft Web Services took a lot longer than I expected.  I was determined to use .NET's ScriptManager to implement the web service because I have already done custom javascript with JSON to pull from web services before.

Most frustratingly, I got stuck on the javascript code calling the webservice. Simply, I didn't realize the function takes in one more parameter than the web service requires. For example, I created a webservice "RepeatResponse(string UserInput)" which would mean that the javascript code would be "[namespace].[class].RepeatResponse("blah blah", [functionName]);" where functionName is a javascript function that will run when the web service responds.

For whatever reason, I did not think about it until I almost gave up and started to remove the javascript for ASP.NET's ScriptManager. While considering the pseudo-code in my head, I realized that I needed to execute a function when the web service responds which caused the light bulb to go off.

The other difficulty is troubleshooting the issue. Although I can break within the javascript, there is no error when the function is called. The only response I received was null.

Overall, there were a few other hiccups in fixing the setup of web services in Visual Studio. So far, I think it may have actually been easier to just use a simple JSON function to execute the web service. I have not found any strong evidence of using ScriptManager over regular JSON.


Note:
To implement ScriptManager, web.config also needs to be updated to include the ScriptHandlerFactory.

<system.webServer>
      <handlers>
        <add name="ScriptHandlerFactory" path="*.asmx" verb="*"
             type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"
             modules="ManagedPipelineHandler"
             scriptProcessor=""
             resourceType="Unspecified"
             requireAccess="Script"
             allowPathInfo="false"
             preCondition="integratedMode"
             responseBufferLimit="4194304"
             />      
      </handlers>
        <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false"/>
    </system.webServer>

Reference
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb763183.aspx - Sample in link does not work