Web service and web invoking becomes more and more popular today as the distributed systems are widely deployed. However, the normal method invoking may cause a disaster when apply to web method because transmitting data over Internet may cause your program to hang for a couple of minutes.

private static string LoadContentFromWeb(string strUri)

{
...

WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

...
}

Figure: Invoke web method by the normal way (Bad - because this will hang your UI thread)

The correct way to invoke web method is using asynchronous call to send a request and use the delegated CallBack method to read the response, see code below:

 public static void GetOnlineVersionAsync(string strUri)
{
    try
    {
     ...

        IAsyncResult r = request.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback(ResCallBack), request);
     }
     catch(WebException ex)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString()) ;
     }
}



private static void ResCallBack(IAsyncResult ar)
{
   try
   {
      string content = string.Empty;
      WebRequest req = (WebRequest)ar.AsyncState;
      WebResponse response = req.EndGetResponse(ar);

      ...

      RaiseOnProductUpdateResult(content);

   }
   catch(WebException ex)
   {
      Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
      RaiseOnProductUpdateResult(string.Empty);
    }
}

Figure: Invoke web method by using asynchronous method and CallBack (Good - UI thread will be free once the request has been sent)

When working with Web Service, asynchronous methods will be automatically generated by your web services proxy.

Figure: Automatically generated asynchronous methods