Web services & serialisation

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I have a common task that all my applications use.

We use kerberos to log the user in, but get additional user information from SQL.

I was therefore thinking that a web service would be ideal for this.

Pass a string name value and return the associated data.

How easy would it be to get the webservice to serialise an object to XML and then re-instantiate it on the requesting server. i.e

1) From IPrinciple get the users name
2) Pass this to a web service
3) Get an employee object ( a simple class containing the data + methods etc)

Thoughts

 

[transparent]

Better yet, instead of returning an Employee object how about returning a super class of Principle continaing a modified Identity object that contained the additional user info???