Web Services

Web services may be a replacement to components, then again, maybe not. Web Services are very similar to components, you create functions and classes and other stuff in VB/C#/Any .NET language and then you just make the things that you want available to the web. MSDN's .NET show has a show where they create a web service and make it available to people, its very good if you are new to .NET available at - http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/Episode013/default.asp, I actually learnt a lot from just watching this episode.

A web service basically gets information and then churns out something (not always) in XML, this data could be a dataset or a string manipulation event may occur. Components however are a bit different as they are a whole application in one, web services I don't see as being an application as much an information provider. Components however are being taken over by these new web services, although I don't like it, it may be wise to think about how to do your old stuff in the new web service way. I plan to do an article on web services, but its quite hard to explain.