Next up in our alphabet soup is Web Services Description Language or WSDL. For those of you like to pronounce your acronyms, that would be "whiz-dull". As you might guess, the purpose of WSDL is to describe the web service that is being exposed. More specifically, it provides the details about the functionality that is implemented, what messages are used to request the service and the sequence in which the messages are exchanged. In other words, everything that an intrepid developer needs to know in order to use our service in their application.

Now defining the WSDL file for a web service is not a requirement for it to be used. However, not having one is like selling an ActiveX component without providing documentation, on-line or otherwise. And even though the format of a WSDL document is convoluted (it is an XML-based standard, after all), most development environments (including Visual Studio) provide tools that will automatically generate WSDL for you. So there is no reason (other than laziness) for not creating a WSDL document for any web service that you develop.