What the *&%*$@! are Web services?

ZDNet | at | by Mike

Last Wednesday, Microsoft released a new software development program called Visual Studio.Net. It's designed to help programmers write code using Microsoft's C# programming language, and it represents the company's big leap into Web services, which many hope will trigger the next generation of corporate computing innovation. Microsoft spent $2 billion developing Visual Studio.Net and C#, but just about every other technology company on the planet.

So what the hell are Web services, anyway? In essence, the term is marketing shorthand for a set of emerging standards that are changing the way software is written, used, and distributed. Fundamentally, Web services are about creating new ways for different kinds of software programs to communicate automatically with one another. In the future you may not realize when you are using a Web service, because most of the software will be running in the background, automating machine-to-machine interactions.