In my previous article, I introduced the plan to use Visual Basic
6.0 (VB6) to consume a .NET Web service. I also presented sample code for
the Web service and discussed how to get this service operational. Now I’ll
explain how to create a proxy in .NET for consuming the .NET Web service. I
will also build and register the proxy component for use in VB6. Finally, I’ll
present sample code for using the proxy within VB6.

Creation of the Web service

Since .NET has the internal workings for hosting and
consuming Web services, I used .NET to create the Web service. I relied on
ASP.NET Web Matrix’s Web Service Proxy Generator to create the code (which was
created to consume the service in .NET). From the Tools menu option, choose the
Web Service Proxy Generator. The information necessary to complete this step
consists of the WSDL URL, the namespace of the proxy, the output directory, and
the source file name. The WSDL URL is nothing more than the URL of your .asmx Web service file. You can choose any namespace you
wish, but it’s a good idea to be consistent. For instance, my namespace is set
to MyWebServiceProxy; I used UserServiceProxy.cs
as the source file name. Considering that I was going to create a .NET project
to add this file to, I entered the same output directory where I was going to
make my project. (Note: Do not
generate the assembly.)

Let the project begin

Now it’s time to create a new project in Visual Studio .NET.
This project Output Type should be a Class Library project. I named my project MyWebServiceProxy. Inside this project, I added the UserServiceProxy.cs source file. I also changed a few of
the visibility statements in this class. The resulting code should look similar
to Listing A.

Now, follow these steps:

  1. Right-click
    the project name in the Project Explorer and choose Properties.
  2. In
    Configuration Properties | Build, set the Register For
    COM Interop option to True.
  3. To
    build the project, create a new Standard EXE project in VB6.
  4. Add
    a reference to the MyWebServiceProxy type
    library.
  5. On
    the default form, add a CommandButton control.
  6. In
    the CommandButton control’s Click event, add the
    following code:
    Dim o As MyWebServiceProxy.UserService
    Dim usr As MyWebServiceProxy.User
    Set o = New MyWebServiceProxy.UserService
    Set usr = o.GetUser(1)
    MsgBoxusr.FirstName & " " & usr.LastName

IntelliSense gives you the public classes of the MyWebServiceProxy library; however, you may not get the
members (i.e., GetUser() method, etc.) available to the classes. This doesn’t mean
that you can’t use them—it just means that you’ll either have to rely on
reference or memory. You can also fix this by implementing an interface. (This
may be a smarter approach, but it isn’t necessary for the purposes of this
article.)

Run the code and see what you get. If everything is set up
correctly, you should get a message box with the user’s first and last name
where the user id is 1.

Overcoming security hurdles

The biggest hurdle you may run into is security. If you get
an “access denied” error, then you have a couple of options. The
first is to impersonate the anonymous account from IIS. In your web.config file for your Web service, make sure to add the Identity
node and set the Impersonate attribute to True. In Internet Services Manager,
change the File Security on your .asmx file. Set the
anonymous account name to a system or domain user account that has sufficient
privileges to access the resources needed by the Web service. If all else fails,
then use an administrator account for this exercise. Try the code again and see
what you get.

Another option is to set the userName
and password attributes in the Identity node in the web.config
file. Once again, set this to an appropriate account. Also, don’t forget to
include the impersonate attribute.

If you’d like the source code for these examples, you can download them
from this zip file.

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