What is the meaning of generating a proxy for a web service ?( .NET in specific)

Question

What does it mean to generate a new proxy for the Web service? What is proxy? I already added web service url into web references. What is disco, wsdl and asmx file?

Answer 1

If you're using .NET, the Web Service Proxy refers to the classes that .NET generates for you (after adding a Web Reference) so that you can interact with the Web Service in your code.

If you're new to development and .NET, you wouldn't notice anything special about the proxy. You'd just consider it the classes you use to interact with the service...but it's what does the heavy lifting behind the scenes to format the SOAP envelope and serialize your requests.

UPDATE

And here's an answer to your edit:

.disco - A file that allos for the discovery of web services on a give server. It's not used often and the standard format that serves the same purpose is UDDI.

.wsdl - Web Service Definition Language. This file defines everything about your service. Available methods, data types, etc.

.asmx - The actual service you would browse to. Equivalent to an aspx file for a .NET Web Page.

Answer 2

Proxy is a class that .NET uses to communicated with remote web service. Your IDE(Visual Studio..) can generate it for you OR you can use wsdl.exe - a tool that is supplied with ASP.NET SDK. Depending on the chosen method it will get added to your application automatically(former case) or you may want to put proxy class into you App_Code folder(latter case).

Answer 3

Adding a web reference generates one or more proxy classes.

See How to Consume a Web Service.