What is a web service?

In the most general terms, a web service is defined as a software system that is designed to support machine-to-machine interaction over a network. More specifically, web services are software systems that provide data and services to other applications. Web services use standard Internet transport protocols such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and standard XML-based document formats such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to exchange information.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is used as the foundation to implement the Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP. WCF became part of the .NET Framework beginning with version 3. WFC provides support for many standard protocols that can be used for web services.