XML Web Services are a wonderful thing. However, they also have some drawbacks.
The one I have to deal with a lot is the sometimes non-availability of the web service that I'm consuming. For whatever the reason, Time-out issues, server down, lazy network admins, it seems like whenever my application has the highest demand for information called via a web service that service is unavailable. So we end up caching the data in SQL Server and if the web service is unavailable we get the last available data from SQL and display it to the user (With proper annotations that the data is time late).
I'm wondering if anyone has a better way of dealing with this problem? Also wouldn't it be great if the Whidbey version of .NET made caching web service data as easy for the developer as user authentication and personalization will be (HINT HINT Microsoft!).
I haven't read the Preview of ADO.NET 2.0 book yet so maybe they've already done this.