You may be right - I did a little digging after writing all teh above and quickly found that authentication with Web Services is *complicated* - way more than I'd have imagined, even though, like you say, Web Services are the heavy-handed "enterprise" approach.
The thing I do like about Web Services is that they're almost self-documenting. At my end, as the provider, I can code-up all the methods and then send over the URL to the WSDL to the other (consuming) developer. They can either try and decipher the WSDL to see what methods are available and what they return or they can import it in to a Visual Studio project and use the Object Explorer to browse what's there in a nice GUI interface.
You may be right - I did a little digging after writing all teh above and quickly found that authentication with Web Services is *complicated* - way more than I'd have imagined, even though, like you say, Web Services are the heavy-handed "enterprise" approach.
The thing I do like about Web Services is that they're almost self-documenting. At my end, as the provider, I can code-up all the methods and then send over the URL to the WSDL to the other (consuming) developer. They can either try and decipher the WSDL to see what methods are available and what they return or they can import it in to a Visual Studio project and use the Object Explorer to browse what's there in a nice GUI interface.