Make your custom web service work on a SharePoint server

So I had written a small web service that uses the SharePoint APIs (the DLLs, not the SP  web services) to update list items on a particular list.  In my dev environment inside visual studio, it works great using ctrl-F5 or F5 to start it.  When I went to deploy it to a shared SharePoint staging environment, I didn’t know how to set it up.  Initially I tried just copying it into inetpub\wwwroot\myWS\ and marking the folder as an application in IIS, naively thinking that was sufficient.  But since this is SharePoint, of course it just isn’t!

I did some googling and found a walkthrough from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms464040%28office.12%29.aspx (or for 2010: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms464040(office.14).aspx).  At first I thought it seemed odd to have to install my web service to the 12\ISAPI folder where it would get mapped to http://myserver/_vti_bin/, and to have to convert my static wsdl and disco files (generated by VS) to .aspx pages to have them handle the correct path, etc., etc.  I resisted the idea and went home for the day.

The next day I decided to try the walkthrough and sure enough it works great.  So I thought I should jot this down for when I run into it again.  Maybe it will help you some day, too.

EDIT: this link may also prove helpful: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/MOSS4Devs-08-WebServices.aspx

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