Developing Webservices to for a sharepoint site without visual studio on the server

Question

We are developing a ipad application for a client for managing the workflows of sharepoint site.

On the middleware i need to develop a .net webservice which will fetch the Tasks details from the sharepoint site using the native webservices(like http://server/_vti_bin/workflow.asmx) and will pass it to IPAD. This thing is no big deal if we have access to sharepoint site.

Problem is from My network i dont have access to their sharepoint site. we can access it using VPN.

and on their sharepoint server they are not providing visual studio.

Please suggest what can i do?

What i think of now i can create a same site and lists on our local sharepoint server and develop on it and later i can just change the URLS and deploy the webservice on the client server. But i personally feel that it will not be feasible solution as the xml response of the our local sharepoint site and client's sharepoint site could be different.

Answer 1

What you describe is a typical scenario when developing Web services.

As you are utilising native SharePoint Web services, you know that the endpoint URL will be available from all content Web applications.

Hence, in your code you can append the endpoint URL to the Web app URL, i.e. http://webapp.domain.com/_vti_bin/workflow.asmx

Additionally, if you are utilising the same endpoint (_vti_bin/workflow.asmx) on the production environment, it is unlikely that the XML response will be different unless they have somehow extended the native functionality (e.g. additional Web methods).

I'm not really a developer so let me know if I'm off the mark. I have however developed numerous applications that utilise native and custom Web services.