Web Service Question

First you must forgive me because I am new to web services! My question/situation is this. I have a messenger program (Windows Form based) that uses a web service. Is there any way to check if that web service is online at any given time. I have read where programs that use web services will "hang" if the service goes down. Is there any way to make sure a web service is up before executing function calls against it? Please post examples. I love this .NET stuff! C# is very cool even for a former java guy.

Thank you in advance,

DeanOn Mon, 5 Jul 2004 14:32:01 -0700, Dean Bortell
<DeanBortell@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>First you must forgive me because I am new to web services! My question/situation is this. I have a messenger program (Windows Form based) that uses a web service. Is there any way to check if that web service is online at any given time. I have read where programs that use web services will "hang" if the service goes down. Is there any way to make sure a web service is up before executing function calls against it? Please post examples. I love this .NET stuff! C# is very cool even for a former java guy.

A web service is nothing more than a web page with a well publicized
way of sending and receiving data. Other than just sending something
and seeing what comes back, I dont know of anything else.

Of course, it should be something you can track as well. If you want
to have a client side timeout, you could do so on your side.