Ever wished you could avoid the overhead of actually traversing the TCP/IP stack when making Web service calls on a single machine? You're not the only one, and a new blog entry by Brian Ritchie demonstrates how to build a Web service proxy that intercepts the SOAP calls and executes the object locally, instead.
He originally intended it as a performance optimization, according to his post, but one area in which this could greatly simplify the .NET developer's life is in debugging and automated unit-testing. Both of these have traditionally been difficult to do across a distributed topology, and doing local execution means one process, one debugger, and no fancy setups to get there.
Read Using web services locally for more information and code.