I am new to web services. The last time I dealt with SOAP was when I created a bunch of wrapper classes that sent requests and received responses back per some response objects/classes I had created. So I had an object to send certain API requests and likewise a set of objects to hold the response back as an object so I could utilize that 3rd party API.

Then someone came to me and said why not just use the wsdl and a web service. Ok, so today I went and created a "Service Reference". I see that this is what's called a "Proxy Class". You just instantiate an instance of this and then walla you have access to all the methods from the wsdl.

But this leaves me with auth questions. Back when I created my own classes manually, I had a class which exposed properties that I would set then access for things like signature, username, password that got sent along with the Http request that were required by whatever 3rd party API I was using to make API calls.

But then with using a Service Reference, how then would I pass this information just like I had done in my custom classes? For instance I'm going to be working with the PayPal API. It requires you to send a signature and a few other pieces of information like username and password.

// Determins if API call needs to use a session based URI
                string requestURI = UseAuthURI == true ? _requestURIAuthBased + aSessionID : _requestURI;

                byte[] data = XmlUtil.DocumentToBytes(doc);

                // Create the atual Request instance
                HttpWebRequest request = CreateWebRequest(requestURI, data.Length);

So how do I pass username, password, signature, etc. when using web service references for each method call? Is it as simple as specifying it as a param to the method or do you use the .Credentials and .URL methods of your proxy class object? It seems to me Credentials means windows credentials but I could be wrong. Is it limited to that or can you use that to specify those required header values that PayPal expects with each method call/API request?