My last post discussed authentication in web service calls using HttpWebRequest.  That caused one reader to wonder how this ties back to SOAP requests.

If you are using wsdl.exe to generate a SOAP proxy class, it derives from System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.  That class has a Credentials property. If you want to use the currently logged-in user’s credentials, you would assign CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials to the Credentials property.  The same comment about having to assign an instance of NetworkCredential or CredentialCache apply as the proxy uses the HttpWebRequest class.

[Updated 8/05/2004]  Check out the article on MSDN about the new SOAP proxy generation support in Whidbey Beta 1, including generating the proxy assembly at build time and how to turn on compression.