Designing communication protocol in .NET?

[SONYFX]

So I'm trying to design the protocol for communication between my system (a website) and a third-party system over the Internet.

Basically, my system will submit queries to the third-party system, whose business logic then generates one or more results in response to each query and stores the results in a repository for my retrieval. Hence my system needs to retrieve those results and display them to the individual users that requested them.

The 3rd party has offered to set up the communication interface in whatever manner I request and build the necessary business logic on their side accordingly.

So I was thinking of using .NET web service to do that, does any one have any high level design ideas?

 

[ncage]

Is security a concern? If it is you will want to use WSE 3.0. Web services are going to send the results to you in plain text so anyone could nab the results that your transfering. I don't know what the 3rd party has so its kind of hard for me to come up with recommendations. I don't know if you will be coding the piece of the 3rd part or if they will offer their programming resources to help you and i have no idea what their systems run (windows/unix/linux/java/ect). If they are using windows and you really want to optimize output you might want to use UDP/TCP sockets instead but you will have to see if they would be ok opening a port in their firewall.