It is possible to call web service from VB6 using Soap Toolkit 3.0. Soap Toolkit works the best when calling Web services created using Soap Toolkit 3.0 and COM objects. This is because Soap Tookit 3.0 comes with the WSDL tool that can generate both the WSDL and WSML files. The later is important in deserialze the soap message and map it to the COM objects on the client-side.

What happens to Web Services not created with Soap Toolkit 3.0? Those web services do not have WSML files. So we can either create WSML manually or create the customer mapper. The later essentially requires to walk through the IXMLDOMNodeList returned by soap call and create and set the properties of COM objects. 

XML in Word 2003 is quite interesting. I should spend some time to study it. See this MSDN online article.

Recently, I tried to port some Java code to C#. Most Java code use SAX to process XML. .net framework library does not support SAX. It supports XMLReader instead. I tried to compare both approaches to see which one would result in cleaner implementation. I encountered two articles. The first article is on xml.com. The article gave a nice example on how to port SAX code to XMLReader code. The second article is by  Dino Esposito on zdnet. The article favors the .net approach considering Dino is largely a Microsoft guy

The difference is tat SAX use a push model while XMLReader uses a pull model. With SAX, we just need to set up an event handler. The default SAX parser acts as a driver to parse the document and fire the events. With XMLReader, we have to create a loop that keeps calling the read method of the XMLReader class. We then have to implement a switch construction that dispatch the processing to other procedures depending on the node type. This model is similar to how we process the Windows message loop. It is possible to construct the dispatching mechanism to be like that of SAX.  At the first glance, it takes less code to setup SAX parser. However, in the subsequent processing, we can call one of the readxxx method of XMLReader to pull additional information. This would gives us more control and cleaner implementation than the SAX model.