Recently someone asked me to troubleshoot the problem he had with the custom web service he created.

He followed the instructions from MSDN article "Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Web Service" and generated MyWebservice.asmx, MyWebservicedisco.aspx and MyWebservicewsdl.aspx files. He also made changes to contract reference and SOAP address in both disco.aspx and wsdl.aspx to provide the necessary redirection and maintain the URL virtualization.

Web service was deployed to 12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS in file system and can be viewed from URL http://<site>/_layouts/MyWebservice.asmx or http://<site>/<subsite>/_layouts/MyWebservice.asmx without any issues.

"Everything looks fine except..." - he said

At this stage I knew what the problem was and his description of the problem confirmed it.

"Everything looks fine except the web service function call returns an incorrect and unexpected result"

Yes, it could be the code logic errors. But I sticked to the one obvious mistake he has made. I told him that "Only deploy your custom web service files to 12\ISAPI (\_vti_bin\) folder unless you know what you are doing"

I have seen this problem many times before from different developers, third party vendor's and IT supports. They all have their own reasons (wrong reasons) for not to deploy their custom web service files to 12\ISAPI.

Why _vti_bin folder

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