The very tools that have helped drive the growing adoption of Web services, and the enabling abstractions that they provide, can often prevent developers from peeking behind the curtains at the XML standards that make up the Web services stack. This article will offer a solution that enables type sharing between proxies created for complementary Web services, while at the same time providing an opportunity to examine the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and its interaction with the Web services tools you know and love. Gerrard Lindsay

In this article the author focuses on one critically important Web services specification that has been largely overlooked: the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL). He describes why BPEL is important and what it offers you if you are implementing Web services today or planning to in the future. Concrete examples using BizTalk Server 2004 are presented in the article. Jon Fancey

If you want to schedule ASP.NET tasks, one solution is to use a Web service to provide an interface to your ASP.NET application and build a Windows service that calls to it at scheduled intervals. Thus the ASP.NET application doesn't have to own the scheduling logic. Here the author shows how to schedule your ASP.NET tasks using a Windows service to initiate the Web service call because Windows services can start themselves when Windows boots up. Andrew Needleman

Web services use XML to communicate with each other. But sometimes the XML your service emits is not the same XML that another service is expecting. If you want to avoid the problems that this kind of situation can cause, you need to get good control over your XML serialization. Here author Chris Dix shows you exactly how to tackle this problem. Chris Dix

When the author was faced with implementing support for changing a security descriptor on an object, he noticed there was not support for that operation in .NET. So he devised two solutions to the problem: the first, simpler one, is tailored to the .NET Framework 1.1 and can be used today. The second solution incorporates several advanced features available only in the .NET Framework 2.0. Both are presented here. Mark Novak

CultureInfo is a complex .NET class whose objects are used for resource loading, formatting, parsing, casing, sorting, and other conventions that change as the language, location, or writing system is changed. It can be tricky to use correctly in every situation. Here Michael Kaplan explains some common scenarios in which you will use CultureInfo and provides information about the behavior, best practices, and consequences of a wrong decision. Michael Kaplan