What are the data types supported by Web Services?

.Net web services are built on XML-based standards for exchanging data. This means .NET web services can support only those data types that can be recognized by the XML schema standard. There are many proprietary .Net objects such as FileSteam, Eventlog etc. are not supported in the web services. These data types are .Net specific types that are not universally recognized, i.e. .Net specific only.

You can even exchange custom objects using .Net web services. The only limitation is that only public data members are transmitted, and all public members and properties must use one of the other supported data types.

You can use DataSet and DataTable to return information from database but can't use other ADO.NET objects such as DataColumns and DataRows.

.Net offers a distributed technology called .Net remoting that can plays around wide range of .Net specific data type. But unfortunately, .Net remoting doesn't support client other than .Net.

Testing and consuming a .Net web service.

Testing a Web Service

.NET has a test web page that ASP.NET uses automatically when you request the URL of an .asmx file in a browser. This page uses reflection to read and show information about the web services, such as the names of the methods it provides.

Consuming a Web Service

Web services are built on XML standard. So, a client needs to equip itself to understand XML-based message in order to exchange messages. The .Net framework provides proxy component that enable clients to interact with web services. The proxy has all necessary information that can be utilized by the client application to share data with web services. 

The proxy class wraps the calls to the web service's methods. It generates SOAP message format and manages the transmission of the messages over the network (using HTTP). When it receives the response message, it converts the results back to the corresponding .NET data types. 

You can create a proxy class in .NET in two ways: 

By using wsdl.exe command-line tool
By using Visual Studio web reference feature