what is meant by web services?

Web services are application components.Web services can be used by any browsers on any platform.Because,

If we created a webservice in .Net platform and posted in a server. Now in java platform application also, we can use this webservice. Because,

The websrvices will return the output as "String" .So we can get this string and we can use it.

Web services can be used to connect business with each other in standard way using,

xml-Used for structuring the data
SOAP(Simple Oject access protocol)-used for tranferring the data
WSDL(weservices description language)-used for describing web services
UDDI(Universal description discovery and Integration)-Used to get the list of services available

namespace:

System.we.webservices

<webmethod()>Public Function FahrenheitToCelsius
(ByVal Fahrenheit As String) As String

'add the functionality here


end sub